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
About this listen
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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On New Year’s Day 2013, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Gene Weingarten asked three strangers to, literally, pluck a day, month, and year from a hat. That day - chosen completely at random - was Sunday, December 28, 1986, by any conventional measure a most ordinary day. Weingarten spent the next six years proving that there is no such thing. That Sunday between Christmas and New Year’s turned out to be filled with comedy, tragedy, implausible irony, cosmic comeuppances, kindness, cruelty, heroism, cowardice, genius, idiocy, and much more....
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I'm giving this book more credit for its concept
- By J. F. Boyd on 12-24-19
By: Gene Weingarten
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Get Well Soon
- History's Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them
- By: Jennifer Wright
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 7 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1518, in a small town in Alsace, Frau Troffea began dancing and didn't stop. She danced until she was carried away six days later, and soon 34 more villagers joined her. Then more. In a month more than 400 people had been stricken by the mysterious dancing plague. In late-19th-century England an eccentric gentleman founded the No Nose Club in his gracious townhome - a social club for those who had lost their noses, and other body parts, to the plague of syphilis for which there was then no cure.
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Didn't know syphilis could be so fascinating.
- By Kindle Customer on 02-09-17
By: Jennifer Wright
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Changing the Way We Die
- Compassionate End-of-Life Care and the Hospice Movement
- By: Sheila Himmel, Fran Smith
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 6 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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There’s a quiet revolution happening in the way we die. More than 1.5 million Americans a year die in hospice care - nearly 44 percent of all deaths - and a vast industry has sprung up to meet the growing demand. Once viewed as a New Age indulgence, hospice is now a $14 billion business and one of the most successful segments in health care. Changing the Way We Die, by award-winning journalists Fran Smith and Sheila Himmel, is the first book to take a broad, penetrating look at the hospice landscape.
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Sadly, not very engaging.
- By Debra S. Long on 06-16-18
By: Sheila Himmel, and others
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The Undying
- Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care
- By: Anne Boyer
- Narrated by: Amy Finegan
- Length: 5 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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A week after her 41st birthday, the acclaimed poet Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. For a single mother living paycheck to paycheck who had always been the caregiver, the catastrophic illness was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness. The Undying explores the experience of illness as mediated by digital screens, weaving in ancient Roman dream diarists, cancer hoaxers and fetishists, cancer vloggers, pro-pain "dolorists", and the many little murders of capitalism.
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Provocative and moving
- By C. FREEMAN on 05-13-20
By: Anne Boyer
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We're Better Than This
- My Fight for the Future of Our Democracy
- By: Elijah Cummings, James Dale
- Narrated by: Nancy Pelosi, Laurence Fishburne, Maya Rockeymoore Cummings
- Length: 10 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Baltimore Congressman Elijah Cummings was known for saying, “We’re better than this.” He said it in Baltimore, a city on the verge of explosion over police treatment of citizens. He said it in Congress when microphones were shut down, barring free speech. He said it when the president flaunted his power and ignored the Constitution. He said it when the president resorted to bullying, name-calling, and feeding racial divisions. We are better than this. He continued to say it until his final days last October.
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The most inspiring piece of work I’ve heard in my adult life.
- By Jaraun on 01-29-21
By: Elijah Cummings, and others
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Brotherhood
- Dharma, Destiny, and the American Dream
- By: Sanjiv Chopra, Deepak Chopra
- Narrated by: Deepak Chopra, Sanjiv Chopra
- Length: 12 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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The Chopra brothers were among the most eager and ambitious of the new generation. In the 1970s, they each emigrated to the United States to make a new life. Both faced tough obstacles: while Deepak encountered resistance from Western-trained doctors over what he called the mind-body connection, Sanjiv struggled to reconcile the beliefs of his birthplace with those of his new home. Eventually, each brother became convinced that America was the right place to build a life, and the Chopras went on to great achievements.
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How to Toot Your Horn
- By Kenneth on 07-01-13
By: Sanjiv Chopra, and others
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Inferno
- A Doctor's Ebola Story
- By: Steven Hatch MD
- Narrated by: Steven Hatch MD
- Length: 11 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Dr. Steven Hatch first came to Liberia in November 2013 to work at a hospital in Monrovia. Six months later, several of the physicians Dr. Hatch had mentored and served with were dead or barely clinging to life, and Ebola had become a world health emergency. Hundreds of victims perished each week; whole families were destroyed in a matter of days; so many died so quickly that the culturally taboo practice of cremation had to be instituted to dispose of the bodies.
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Good story, spoiled by politics.
- By Roman Vogel on 07-22-17
By: Steven Hatch MD
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Concussion (Movie Tie-in Edition)
- By: Jeanne Marie Laskas
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 9 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Jeanne Marie Laskas first met the young forensic pathologist Dr. Bennet Omalu in 2009, while reporting a story for GQ that would go on to inspire the movie Concussion. Omalu told her about a day in September 2002, when, in a dingy morgue in downtown Pittsburgh, he picked up a scalpel and made a discovery that would rattle America in ways he’d never intended. Omalu was new to America, chasing the dream, a deeply spiritual man escaping the wounds of civil war in Nigeria.
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If you know, come forth and speak.
- By Cynthia on 12-14-15
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The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
- A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures
- By: Anne Fadiman
- Narrated by: Pamela Xiong
- Length: 13 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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When three-month-old Lia Lee arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion from which neither she nor her parents nor her doctors would ever recover. Lia's parents, Foua and Nao Kao, were part of a large Hmong community in Merced, refugees from the CIA-run "Quiet War" in Laos.
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Good audiobook but narrator struggles with basic pronunciation
- By Kate on 06-04-15
By: Anne Fadiman
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Viral Justice
- How We Grow the World We Want
- By: Ruha Benjamin
- Narrated by: Ruha Benjamin
- Length: 13 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Long before the pandemic, Ruha Benjamin was doing groundbreaking research on race, technology, and justice, focusing on big, structural changes. But the twin plagues of COVID-19 and anti-Black police violence inspired her to rethink the importance of small, individual actions. Part memoir, part manifesto, Viral Justice is a sweeping and deeply personal exploration of how we can transform society through the choices we make every day.
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Fantastic book!
- By Avie Kearney on 05-21-23
By: Ruha Benjamin
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Ten Drugs
- How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine
- By: Thomas Hager
- Narrated by: Angelo Di Loreto
- Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Beginning with opium, the “joy plant,” which has been used for 10,000 years, Thomas Hager tells a captivating story of medicine. His subjects include the largely forgotten female pioneer who introduced smallpox inoculation to Britain, the infamous knockout drops, the first antibiotic, which saved countless lives, the first antipsychotic, which helped empty public mental hospitals, Viagra, statins, and the new frontier of monoclonal antibodies. This is a deep, wide-ranging, and wildly entertaining book.
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Engrossing to physicians & lay persons alike
- By C. White on 03-08-19
By: Thomas Hager
What listeners say about If It Sounds Like a Quack...
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Scott
- 06-24-23
Lots of connections to understand why our world has gone haywire.
Like one true cures, there is no one true reason why American, social and civic discourse has become unhinged in recent years. Nonetheless, this book offers a coherent set of observations, on the descent into pseudoscience that dovetail with the rise of extreme right nationalism and the destruction of civil and political institutions that form the basis of a functioning society. Often scathingly ironic in his commentary, Hongoltz-Hetling never loses compassion for the victims of medical quacks and tries to find more than the villain in the practitioners of quackery.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Christine
- 09-14-23
WOW! A Must Read!
Leeches, aliens, game show hosts, zombies, religion, avocados, cancer, bleach, Libertarians, the January 6th insurrection, experimenting on prisoners in Africa, baking soda--if you cannot imagine what all of these things have in common, Hongoltz-Hetling puts it all together for you!
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!
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4 people found this helpful
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- Daniel
- 07-22-23
Excellent materialist analysis of the public’s ideology about medical care
Well written and able to cover dark subject matter without downplaying it or wallowing in it either. This is one of the most cohesive accounts I’ve seen of the actual material factors that have driven people to this insanity. My only complaint is that the author didn’t include the alternative care Lyme disease community except in passing. That’s just because of my own personal vendetta against them for treating what was actually lung cancer with bogus Lyme disease protocols. That said I’m sure there are unfortunately many other instances that could also not be included.
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.
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- Paul/Big Dog
- 04-29-24
Biden is amazing, republicans and Trump are crazy
I picked up a few interesting tidbits in the book. That was cool. As the book progressed, it gradually became more political until the end of the book where it was nearly all political, pitching Democrats and Biden as saints and Republicans insane in general and especially Trump. For a book about medical quackery, it was way too policial.
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