By Rabbi Eli
Teitelbaum
Health fraud is an old and very successful business. The
reason is simple. When someone is very sick, it’s easy to take advantage of his
desperate situation by offering him all sorts of miracle cures. People without
hope will grasp onto any straw offered them, no matter how ridiculous it may
sound, in the hope that it will provide a cure. They are willing to try herbs
and absurd concoctions of all sorts that claim they can cure the incurable.
Desperate and gullible people will buy anything offered them, even if it
includes spider legs and snake oil. Hopelessness and wishful thinking easily
overpower reason and common sense. There are people who have made millions by
claiming that they have the special ability to bring about magical cures. Any
health claims, no matter how ridiculous, bizarre, and absurd they may be, will
be swallowed by enough people to make their producers rich. Voodoo and witch
doctors have made alternate medicine a viable option for thousands of people.
These modern health quacks are super salesmen, skillfully playing on people’s
fears, hopes, and naiveté.
Since many aches, pains, and illnesses will go away even
when left untreated, it is easy to collect testimonials from countless people
that were “cured” with their magical
formulas. Many testimonials are faked or “enhanced” by clever charlatans.
Misleading advertisements and misinformation about foods, nutrition supplements
and nonprescription drugs in health magazines are widespread, and often seduce
the unsuspecting reader into believing them. Many magazines make money carrying
such ads and will certainly not kill the goose laying the golden eggs by
publishing articles criticizing them.
And so while science may not have
all the answers, quackery has no answers at all, but will take your hard earned
money and leave you with an aching heart and an empty pocket. Unfortunately,
many promoters of alternate medicine and quackery may even be honest people who
truly believe in the products they promote.
Recently, when one very famous
Jewish scam artist’s many fraudulent business ventures were closed up by the
government, he decided to advertise some of these dubious health claims in
order to earn a living. Since “a sucker is born every minute,” he is now doing
quite well as he draws countless flies into his net.
A doctor once rented out a
special black box, which he claimed could heal people, on the condition that
one was not permitted to open it up to see the secret remedy it contained. He
made millions renting out his contraption. After he died, people opened the box
and to their surprise and chagrin, all they found were some nuts, bolts and
tangled wires. “Magnetic healing pouches” are making fantastic claims, but when
scientists surreptitiously replaced the magnet inside the pouch with an
ordinary stone, they found the results were the same. Unfortunately, quackery
is not sold with a warning label.
One of the latest medical scams
hitting the Jewish community is the “pendulum” scam. This is when a weight or
crystal is suspended at the end of a string or chain and the device is held
over the person and is allowed to swing freely as it supposedly answers
questions put to it by the direction in which it swings. It’s hard to believe
that intelligent people will fall for this irrational and absurd swindle. Some
pious Jews are even practicing some of this quackery in their misguided belief
that it actually works. How painful and tragic that this hoax has even received
the approval and endorsement of a very esteemed rosh yeshivah who has been
misled into believing that the “pendulum” actually possesses some mysterious
healing powers. Beside the outright
theft involved, raising false hopes for the seriously ill is one of the
cruelest and most dangerous forms of quackery since it lures victims away from
more effective treatments that can sometimes save lives.
History has shown, (as in the
story of Shaul Hamelech) that in times of great desperation, even the greatest
of the great can seek the advice of what the Torah clearly forbids. One can
read all about these quack devices in a book entitled “Tales of Medical Fraud
from the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices” by Bob McCoy. Another very
important book on this subject is “The Health Robbers; A Closer Look at
Quackery in America” by Dr. Stephen Barrett, and Dr. William Jarvis, Ph.D. who
teach us how to tell experts from pretenders and how to get reliable
information. Only through proper education can people learn to protect
themselves from the unscrupulous money-grubbers and charlatans who fatten their
wallet by preying on the sick and infirm, the ignorant, and naïve.
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