For fifty years now, Dr. Joe Schwarcz has been lecturing, going on tv, radio and magazines, hosting a radio show and writing books – all about the frauds of alternative medicine. He checks out every single one he learns about. He’ll buy anything that’s offered. He’ll trace the maker of it and its history. He runs McGill University’s Office for Science and Society, which patiently examines every little thing that comes along, hoping to one day find something that actually works. So far, nada. Quack Quack is his latest book.

The book is one long chapter, broken into 73 one to three page stories about products and services that make their developers rich and do nothing for their customers (though sometimes they kill them, mostly by diverting them from real healthcare). That is unless you consider performing as well as a placebo a mark of success. Because that is all they ever accomplish.

In some ways, nothing has changed - ever. Fake cures have been around since the time of shamans. But today’s hustlers have glommed onto tech lingo, which has enabled them to promote massive new varieties of worthless products. Magnetism and magnetic fields can be employed to cure anything. So can copper and the fields it generates. Attaching the word bio to anything gives it new appeal. Same for electro, detox, energy, vibrating, and of course, smart. It is astonishing (and honestly, wearying) to read all the ways people market bogus cures.

There is no question readers will recognize many from commercials, infomercials and ads. There is something for everyone in this book, from bogus supplements to bogus pipes that return water to its normal, cure-all, agitated state (Straight pipes kill it, you see). Schwarcz says: “Today, the traveling medicine show with its fascinating mix of fun and flimflam is gone. But not forgotten. If you get a chance, take in a Psychic Fair or a Health Food Expo at a hotel or convention hall and experience a throwback to the past. I did. There were crystal healers, astrologers, and dietary supplements galore. Some of the claims sounded like they came straight from the mouths of the Kickapoo pitch doctors.”

Magnets are still big: “There are magnetic mattresses, pads, bandages, insoles, rings, and bracelets.
You can even buy magnetized water. A remarkable website sells magnetic immortality rings that claim to increase life span.”

But high tech water seems to be the most popular cure. It’s cheap, can be colored inexpensively, and there are lots of new words to pump up its pretended medicinal effects. Alkaline, electro, vitamin, smart, live, raw – water is the superfood for our time. Scammers love to claim they can alter the actual chemical composition of water’s molecules, giving it new and better powers, or just refreshing its old ones. Which it never had. But at least it won’t kill you. It’s just really expensive.

They love conspiracies, too. Many of the products employ a line about how Big Pharma doesn’t want you to know about this. Better buy it right now before they force it off the market. Etc.

There are lots of unmeasurable waves too. Some claim to mentally transmit cures anywhere in the world with just a photo in front of them. Some can cure by just passing their hands over someone else. Malaria goes away in just four hours! There are innumerable scammers who cure cancer by leveraging auras, meridians and chakras, high frequency and low frequency waves, moonbeams, magnetic fields and on and on.

And they love mixing scientific sounding words into long sentences that make their product sound like cutting edge technology. But reading them clearly shrieks – meaningless garbage: “The human body has a resonant frequency and coherence is its natural state.” Or “Chimps and humans have similar DNA, so that couldn’t explain the difference between them, the explanation is the morphogenetic field that informs which parts of DNA the body will access for its development.” Needless to say, Schwarcz adds, healers can restore health by altering this “morphogenetic field,” a totally fictional and meaningless term. Nonetheless, such products come emblazoned with messages like “As seen on the Dr. Oz Show!” giving them the ring of authenticity.

Schwarcz goes after the detox people fiercely. He defends the human body as having great detox functions, from the likes of the liver, the kidneys and the gut microbiome. It does not need bizarre diets to try to remove residues of anything; they’ve already been handled. Not that the detox recipes can have any salubrious effect anyway; they have no basis in science and no way to detoxify a human body.

Similarly, dietary supplements are a huge scam, with totally unprovable benefits. Rubbing vitamin C on skin can have no effect. Swallowing vitamin A does not improve eyesight. Ingesting vitamin E does not restore memory, and on and on. But because they are not marketed as drugs, Congress has seen fit to exempt them from testing, allowing them to be promoted in all kinds of immoral ways. They don’t really do anything. But they’re a multibillion dollar business anyway.

Possibly my favorite story in this collection is on candling. For just $25, Schwarcz bought two simple white candles, with hollow centers. You stick one in your ear and light it, creating a chimney effect, sucking ear wax out and into the candle. The clerk proves it by then cutting open the candle and showing you all the brown guck collected inside. But Schwarcz took his second candle, lit it and placed it over a scrap of tissue on the counter. The “chimney” couldn’t even hold onto the tissue, so how could it scrape and lift ear wax? Then he cut open the candle, and what do you know? It was filled with “ear wax”.

Schwarcz is a pain because he always wants proof. He wants to try the product in laboratory conditions, run tests, and somehow prove it will do better than a placebo. He wants to understand the chemistry (his profession), the physics and even the magic (he is an amateur magician). He is continually bombarded with products the gullible want to market or at least recommend. This makes him a busy man: “Whenever you think you have seen the ultimate in absurdity, something else comes along and reaches even loftier heights.”

And finally, in answer to why more research and authentication isn’t being done, Schwarcz says it is. “The Office of Alternative Medicine was created in 1991 and given a budget of two million dollars. It was later converted to the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) and had a budget of $151.9 million for 2020. The center will even award grants and organize clinical trials. Perhaps we can look forward to some interesting results; but so far since 1991 not much has happened. Not a
single alternative treatment was found to be highly effective and not a single one was completely debunked.” In other words, everyone truly wants one of these miracle products to be for real. But so far… nada.

Schwarcz is chatty. He likes to talk directly to the reader. He tries to keep it light, despite the worrying fraud and risks. He is sarcastic, ironic and cutting. And very serious about getting readers to stay away from these scams. He likes to tie his stories up with a pun or snarky comment linking the conclusion to the intro over some key word. It helps break up the sordid nature of this whole enterprise and helps make Quack Quack most readable.

David Wineberg ( )

I was all kinds of excited when I was browsing Netgalley and came across Quack Quack: The Threat of Pseudoscience by Dr. Joe Schwarcz, the director at McGill University’s Office for Science and Society. The book aims to convince people of the importance of separating sense from nonsense, and it’s packed with plenty of examples of the kind of quackery that people are promoting and making lots of money off of.

The book’s main focus is the nonsense of the present, but it begins with a look at some of the quackery of the past. For example, “In the late 1800s, the Battle Creek Sanitarium was unquestionably the place to be for people who needed to be cured of diseases they never had.”

You might recall that drinking one’s own urine was one of the bizarre ideas people came up with for supposedly curing COVID. There’s a chapter devoted to autourine therapy (i.e. drinking one’s own urine), and apparently, there was a World Conference on Urine Therapy.

Then there’s the woman who thought fermented cabbage juice could cure anything and everything, let you regrow missing limbs, and let you live 400 years. Regarding that, Dr. Joe says, “Never before have I heard such concentrated hogwash in such a short time.” He writes that her claims are “full of baloney. Or bunkum. Or balderdash. Take your choice. I have other words too.”

A fair bit of the book is devoted to debunking the weird and wacky claims that people make about water. For example, there’s alkaline water, and Dr. Joe points out that even if it did change the pH of the blood (which it doesn’t), “you would not have to worry about illness because you would be dead.” There’s also the notion of double helix water, as opposed to regular water, which is supposedly weakened by flowing through straight pipes. Then there’s raw water, which can actually harm you depending on what bacteria happen to be contaminating it (I can’t even begin to tell you how not fun it is to have a Giardia infection, quaintly known as “beaver fever“).

The author points out how companies that make these dodgy products will often string together a bunch of words that sound scientific but are actually meaningless. Regarding a device that’s claimed to energize water, he says, “In all my years of wading through swamps of claptrap I don’t think I have come across anything to match the stew of random, garbled, meaningless words cooked up on behalf of Alpha Spin.”

Dr. Joe explains that the most prevalent myth that he’s come across is that “natural” substances are somehow inherently superior to synthetic ones. He points out that chemicals are made out to be a bad thing, but all atoms are chemicals, so the notion of chemical-free doesn’t even make any sense. And if you thought homeopathic remedies were just another kind of herbal product, they’re not, Dr. Joe will explain to you just how wacky the idea behind homeopathy is (trust me, it’s really out there).

The book concludes with a chapter with tips on evaluating information/misinformation, like “nonsensical lingo can sound very scientific”, “nature is not benign”, and “education is not a vaccine against folly.”

This book is hilarious. The things the author is talking about are funny, but it’s the way he talks about them that is absolute gold. I love his word choices, including mountebank, “mind-numbing claptrap”, poppycock, “mindless twaddle”, “woo-isms”, mumbo jumbo, balderdash, malarkey, puffery, and gobbledygook. There were plenty of bits that had me laughing, such as this after being urged not to knock a product before trying it: “Well, I’m knocking. We do not live in a scientific vacuum. We do not concoct ways to trap the tooth fairy.” It was rather difficult to limit myself when it came to the number of quotes I included in this review, since there were just so many great lines.

I loved this book. I think anyone with a science background will find it highly amusing, and I hope that it will convince some people to keep their money to themselves rather than hand it over to hucksters trying to make them think that they need a magic carafe to make double-helix water. Our world is desperately in need of more sense, and hopefully Dr. Joe’s book will help to put a bit of a dent in the shortage thereof. ( )