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Quackery, often synonymous with health fraud, is the promotion [1] of fraudulent or ignorant medical practices. A quack is a "fraudulent or ignorant pretender to medical skill" or "a person who pretends, professionally or publicly, to have skill, knowledge, qualification or credentials they do not possess; a charlatan or snake oil salesman". [2]
Alternative medicine is a term often used to describe medical practices where are untested or untestable.Complementary medicine (CM), complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), integrated medicine or integrative medicine (IM), functional medicine, and holistic medicine are among many rebrandings of the same phenomenon.
The terms alternative medicine, complementary medicine, integrative medicine, holistic medicine, natural medicine, unorthodox medicine, fringe medicine, unconventional medicine, and new age medicine are used interchangeably as having the same meaning and are almost synonymous in most contexts.
Synonyms for charlatan include shyster, quack, or faker. Quack is a reference to quackery or the practice of dubious medicine, including the sale of snake oil , or a person who does not have medical training who purports to provide medical services.
Through the 18th and 19th centuries, many "patent medicines" were claimed to be panaceas, and they became very big business. The term "panacea" is used in a negative way to describe the overuse of any one solution to solve many different problems, especially in medicine. [1] The word has acquired connotations of snake oil and quackery. [2]
Lydia Estes Pinkham (born Estes; February 9, 1819 – May 17, 1883) was an American inventor and marketer of a herbal-alcoholic "women's tonic" for menstrual and menopausal problems, which medical experts dismissed as a quack remedy, but which is still on sale today in a modified form.
The history of alternative medicine covers the history of a group of diverse medical practices that were collectively promoted as "alternative medicine" beginning in the 1970s, to the collection of individual histories of members of that group, or to the history of western medical practices that were labeled "irregular practices" by the western medical establishment.
Radithor was a patent medicine that is a well-known example of radioactive quackery. It consisted of triple-distilled water containing at a minimum 1 microcurie (37 kBq ) each of the radium-226 and 228 isotopes.