
If It Sounds Like a Quack...
A Journey to the Fringes of American Medicine
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Narrated by:
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Jamie Renell
A Pulitzer Prize finalist's bizarre journalistic journey through the world of fringe medicine, filled with leeches, baking soda IVs, and, according to at least one person, zombies.
It's no secret that American health care has become too costly and politicized to help everyone. So where do you turn if you can't afford doctors, or don't trust them? In this book, Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling examines the growing universe of non-traditional treatments—including some that are really non-traditional.
With costs skyrocketing and anti-science sentiment spreading, the so-called "medical freedom" movement has grown. Now it faces its greatest challenge: going mainstream. In this book, you'll meet medical freedom advocates including an international leech smuggler, a gold miner-turned health drink salesman who may or may not be from the Andromeda galaxy, and a man who says he can turn people into zombies with aerosol spray. One by one, these alternative healers find customers, then expand and influence, always seeking the one thing that would take their businesses to the next level—the support and approval of the government.
Should the government dictate what is medicine and what isn't? Can we have public health when disagreements over science are this profound? No, seriously, can you turn people into flesh-eating zombies? If It Sounds Like a Quack asks these critical questions while telling the story of how we got to this improbable moment, and wondering where we go from here. Buckle up for a bumpy ride...unless you're against seatbelts.
©2023 Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling (P)2023 PublicAffairsListeners also enjoyed...




















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I love reading books about medicine (see also Quackery, Dr. Mutter's Marvels, Diagnosis, Get Well Soon, Bad Faith, Weekends at Bellevue, Wicked Plants, The Butchering Art, Skeleton Keys, Heart, Epidemics, and all books by Atul Gawande), and this book starts off looking at a group of individuals who are quacks. Although coming from very different places, they all espouse medicine that is not really medicine.
As we get more into each person's story--and the damage they inflict--we also learn about others, a brief history of leeches in medicine, the FDA, and the hugely profitable supplement business (and the politicians who make tons of money from these quacks). As the book goes along, politics become a larger part of the narrative (as do deaths, lawsuits, and cost cases). We end up at Covid, and we have seen how certain groups of Americans had been primed by politics and certain "news" organizations, to shun vaccines, masks, and government decrees that benefit the greater good.
It is an absolutely fascinating history, and the people whose quackery we follow (the author speaks with most of them) all become interwoven, although they are all acting separately.
And the author does not just examine the quacks and the people making money off of them. He also examines the laws, the governmental organizations, and the media who play a part in their destructive behavior.
A great performance for a great book. A Must Read!
WOW! A Must Read!
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Overall excellent read and a compelling argument against the private, for profit medical system and a regulatory system that has been defunded and hollowed out.
Excellent materialist analysis of the public’s ideology about medical care
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Lots of connections to understand why our world has gone haywire.
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very interesting how many people believe in zombies and other unbelievable things.
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Biden is amazing, republicans and Trump are crazy
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