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Morris Fishbein and the AMA's Crusade Against America's Consummate Quack, John Brinkley

Charlatan: America's Most Dangerous Huckster, The Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam
By Pope Brock
New York, NY, Crown Books, 2008
ISBN-13: 978-0-307-33988-1

Howard Markel, MD, PhD

JAMA. 2008;299(18):2217-2219.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

It is the inattentive physician who has not realized that patients who leave the clinic clutching a prescription invariably seem happier than those who do not. This very human characteristic serves as the source for a Niagara Falls of pharmaceutical products, over-the-counter medications, alternative medicines, nutritional supplements, herbal remedies, nostrums, and cure-alls.

Aside from the risks posed by those medications physicians legitimately prescribe, there are those posed by individuals who hawk counterfeit, harmful, or ineffective materials advertised as bona fide cures. Alas, as long as there has been a history of medicine, there has been a history of quacks. No less a source than the Oxford English Dictionary derives this most offensive of medical epithets from the medieval Dutch word, quacksalver, the boastful barkers, posing as medical experts, who sold useless and sometimes harmful salves in town squares.

Perhaps the most notorious quack in recent . . . [Full Text of this Article]