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Six months into the second Trump administration, it has become clear that now is the time of con men. Scams and snake oil proliferate, as do the hucksters who promote them. Before Mike Huckabee became our ambassador to Israel, he advertised Relaxium, an herbal supplement whose makers falsely pledged it would help a restless nation sleep. Other supplement-makers see a champion in Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who not only opposes vaccines but has said the Food and Drug Administration should free the nation from the “aggressive suppression” of dubious vitamins and herbal substances. Kennedy has even hired David Geier to conduct a study into the debunked link between autism and vaccines, though authorities once punished Geier for experimenting on autistic children in a basement laboratory. Like his late father, Mark, Geier believes the puberty blocker Lupron can treat autism and says vaccines caused the developmental condition. Neither claim is true, but in the greater Make America Healthy Again universe, facts can be inconvenient.
Dubious supplements and false cures have always been part of the quack’s tool kit, but Kennedy and his ilk aren’t limiting themselves to the mere promotion of pseudoscience. They’re attacking scientific research at the same time. Funding cuts and layoffs are weakening major institutions like the National Institutes of Health and the FDA, which were established to monitor our food supply and medicines for safety. The administration has canceled research grants to universities, slowing the pace of innovation. Scientists searching for cures and treatments for Alzheimer’s, various cancers, and genetic diseases say their work is in jeopardy — if it can continue at all. The MAHA war on expertise leaves Americans ever more vulnerable to predators and scams, which in turn exacerbates a much older problem: The quack has too much power and prospers in times of inequality and mistrust.
In 2019, the Pew Research Center found 86 percent of Americans felt confident in the work of the country’s scientists. That figure declined during the pandemic, and though it rebounded slightly by 2024, it remains lower than its pre-COVID levels. Behind the numbers are hucksters who prospered during the pandemic thanks in part to Donald Trump himself. Although the president’s first term oversaw the rapid development of COVID vaccines, Trump also told people to inject disinfectant to fight the virus. Grifters peddled ivermectin, a horse dewormer, along with an anti-malarial drug called hydroxychloroquine, which is not an effective COVID treatment. Trump would later tout it at a press conference, leading to fatal consequences for at least one listener. Hydroxychloroquine sounds a lot like chloroquine, a non-pharmaceutical chemical sold to clean fish tanks. An Arizona couple had purchased the substance to treat their koi pond and decided to drink it after tuning in to Trump’s performance. The wife lived; her husband did not. Meanwhile, luminaries like the disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker sold colloidal silver as a COVID remedy.
There is no evidence that colloidal silver can treat any physical ailment or that ivermectin has a use beyond the elimination of parasites. Yet people still take them, often to their own detriment. Scott Adams, the right-wing creator of “Dilbert,” recently admitted he had used ivermectin to treat his prostate cancer. It didn’t work, and Adams says he expects to die from the disease this summer. Amy Carlson, the QAnon-adjacent cult leader better known as Mother God, consumed so much colloidal silver that her skin had turned blue by the time she died. Both discovered what scientists and physicians already knew: Quackery may promise good health, but it can’t make good on its pledge. At best, it does nothing; at worst, it kills. Despite this, quacks endure, and so does the risk they pose to public health. If MAHA sweeps the scientific Establishment aside, history suggests a wild and dangerous era awaits.
Quackery is at least as old as the United States itself. Frontier life promised all sorts of dangers, and early settlers brought bizarre therapeutics with them to stave off fever and premature death. Unscrupulous apothecaries and makers of nostrums, as quack medicines are sometimes known, discovered a lucrative new market that alarmed professionals with medical training. In The Toadstool Millionaires, historian James Harvey Young quotes one colonial physician who suggested a “licensing system” that would “remove the ‘Shoemakers, Weavers, and Almanack-Makers, with their virtuous Consorts, who have laid aside the proper Business of their Lives, to turn Quacks.’” But profit beckoned, and quacks proliferated for many decades to come, though they achieved no results worth mentioning. In the 18th century, the Connecticut physician Elisha Perkins devised a pair of “metallic tractors,” or rods, that could allegedly cure painful ailments like rheumatism and generated a brief international mania. The Connecticut Medical Society expelled Perkins for nostrum-making, but he persisted, convinced of his own genius. When yellow fever struck New York City in 1799, he went out to treat the sick with a mixture of “marine salt, vinegar, and water” until he inevitably fell ill, died, and was buried in a potter’s field near what is now Washington Square Park.
During the Gilded Age, the growth of the newspaper industry, the rise of public advertising, and the construction of railroads coincided with radical social and economic inequality — a complex situation that nostrum-makers could and did exploit. In one extreme case, Henry T. Helmbold spread word of “buchu,” a plant native to southern Africa, along the length of the Union Pacific Railroad. The bold advertising strategy worked, and Helmbold became a wealthy eccentric who enjoyed ruling-class patronage for years. In New York, his “Temple of Pharmacy” boasted “sarcophagus soda fountains, floor-to-ceiling mirrors, monogrammed gas globes, marble floors with the doctor’s initials inlaid in brass, fountains for dispensing perfume, and canary birds tweeting in their cages,” Young wrote. Temple attendants in elaborate uniforms sold buchu to Boss Tweed and John Jacob Astor. The problem? Buchu didn’t work, and Helmbold was an alcoholic. The temple closed, the birds died, and then so did Helmbold, in 1892.
Helmbold courted the rich while other quacks pursued the poor. In the years before Helmbold constructed his temple, the Philadelphia nostrum-maker William Swaim sold a “panacea” for use in a city almshouse. Though Swaim said the drug had cured a patient there, the Philadelphia Medical Society eventually concluded the opposite was true: The patient had died. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. observed in the 1840s that quacks, “in trumping up ‘Dispensaries,’ ‘Colleges of Health,’ and other advertising charitable clap-traps,” had used “the poor as decoy-ducks for the rich.” A façade of respectability allowed them to prey on the unsuspecting, however, and by 1906, Congress felt pressured to act. The Pure Food and Drug Act made it illegal to sell misbranded or adulterated food and drugs, and it helped establish the FDA, though quack medicines still appeared on market shelves. The skeptic researcher Joe Nickell wrote in 1998 that patent medicines like Dr. Worden’s Female Pills and Dr. McBain’s Blood Pills were sold by mail-order companies years after the act took effect, and he noted that the later rise of “alternative medicine” could threaten modern generations if left unchecked.
Today’s quacks have learned to manipulate various regulatory loopholes to sell fake cures to the masses. Homeopathy is hardly more sophisticated than Dr. McBain’s Blood Pills, but consumers can still purchase bottles of such medicines at Whole Foods. Insurance companies will often cover chiropractic treatment, though the field was founded by a spiritualist who got the idea from a ghost. My brother and I used to giggle at “horny goat weed” in our local gas stations, but the side effects aren’t that funny; it can make the user puke or hallucinate. These days, you can buy it on Amazon. Wealthier consumers may prefer to shop from Goop, which sells a “gemstone heat-therapy map” for $1,049. A bro who tunes in to Joe Rogan may hear of wondrous nootropics like Alpha Brain, created by a Rogan friend; a 2024 lawsuit accused the maker of “deceptive” advertising. The FDA “can’t even require that supplements be effective before they are sold,” KFF Health News reported in February. Medical scams and nostrum-making are still popular — and profitable, too, even though they can be dangerous. In January, a Michigan child burned to death inside a hyperbaric oxygen chamber where he had endured 36 futile treatments for ADHD and sleep apnea.
Though the United States does not stand alone in its susceptibility to nostrums, its unfettered free market is a bonanza for hucksters. The FDA hasn’t approved the use of hyperbaric oxygen therapy for conditions like autism and ADHD, but clinics and med spas across the country advertise miraculous effects and remain largely unregulated, which frees them to maximize profits at the expense of consumers. Social media spreads dubious medical claims further than even Helmbold could dream. On Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube, anyone can be a quack or work for one. So-called “alternative medicine” was a multibillion-dollar business in the U.S. before Trump ever took office. Now that he’s back in power, with Kennedy helming public health, we are poised for a new golden age of quackery.
Trump is in some respects the quintessential president of the quack. He is a huckster in his own right, as former Trump University students may attest, and pseudoscience can prop up an authoritarian government. Dr. David Gorski, a surgical oncologist and the editor of Science-Based Medicine, has called the MAHA movement “the new Lysenkoism,” invoking a Soviet scientist who rose to prominence during Stalin’s regime. Trofim Lysenko repudiated Darwinism and the emerging field of genetics on ideological grounds, and his unfounded agricultural theories helped Stalin starve millions of people. We’re not there, but quackery still exacts a significant human toll.
A nationwide measles outbreak has killed at least two children, but anti-vaccine parents and some doctors have attempted to treat the disease with cod-liver oil, though there’s no evidence that it works. Kennedy has nevertheless promoted the oil as a treatment for measles in his public statements. In May, Trump nominated Kennedy ally Casey Means to be surgeon general, though Means has questioned the childhood vaccine schedule and called researcher Dale Bredesen a “medical hero” — though Bredesen no longer practices medicine, he promotes a complicated diet and supplement regime that he claims can reverse symptoms of Alzheimer’s. Mostly, it’s expensive. People can pay $810 to join Apollo Health, Bredesen’s company, which matches them with a Bredesen-approved physician. The New York Times reported one Illinois couple spent $25,000 to treat Alzheimer’s the Bredesen way before concluding that the Bredesen protocol doesn’t work.
Lawmakers thus face a difficult if urgent task, and so do the nation’s experts. Trump won’t be around forever, and he’s making sure pseudoscience will outlast him. The root of the problem isn’t necessarily public ignorance but exploitation. Right now, it’s a predator’s market, and that’s not a coincidence. Without robust public institutions and a health-care system that prioritizes care over profit, mistrust will fester. Americans will lead sicker and shorter lives, and the next pandemic may be even deadlier than COVID. Others will waste money on treatments that don’t work or sacrifice their children to scam artists. Fighting Trump means fighting MAHA and, with it, the quack and the huckster. Rebuilding the federal government and closing regulatory loopholes will cost nostrum-makers some cash, but it’s the only way to make America healthy at last.
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