Debunk It! Fake News Edition by John Grant

Author:John Grant [Grant, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Young Adult Nonfiction, Young Adults, Social Studies, Politics, Government, Language Arts, Communication, Communicate, Media Studies, Media, Visual Communication, Audio Communication, 2016 Presidential Election, Ad Hominem, AIDS, Alternative Medicine, anti-science, Antivaxers, Anti-vaxxers, Archaeology, Archeology, Bullshit, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin and the Theory of Evolution, Cherry Picking Data, Climate Change, Climate Change Denial, Climate Skeptics, Confirmation Bias, Conspiracy Theories, Creationism, Critical Thinking, Debunk, Debunk It!, Deceptive Spin, Dishonesty, ESP, Evidence, Evolution, Fact Checking, Fact-checking, Fake News, Fake News Edition, Faking History, Gish Gallop, Global Warming, Greenhouse Effect, HIV, Hoaxes, Holocaust, How to Stay Sane in a World of Misinformation, Immunization, Intelligent Design, Intermediate Readers, John Grant, Logical Fallacies, Misinformation, Motivated Reasoning, Parapsychology, Pseudoscience, Quack Medicine, Quackery, Science, Scientific Method, Sources, Spiritualism, Stereotypes, Straw Man, Therapeutic Prayer, Trickery, Truth, U.S. History - Revolutionary War and New Nation (1754-1820s), Vaccination, Vaccinations, Woo, Zest Books
Publisher: Lerner Publishing Group
Published: 2019-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

People like Drown, Abrams, and Hoxsey were obvious frauds. They were in it for the money. But others have genuinely believed they’ve found ways to counter cancer, and not all have been obviously cranks. Linus Pauling won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954 and then the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962. Later in life he convinced himself cancer could be kept at bay using massive doses of vitamin C. Because of his distinguished career, people took him seriously, even after numerous experiments done by others had shown that the effects Pauling described were illusory.57 He also advocated revolutionizing psychiatry by the introduction of what he called orthomolecular therapy, whereby vitamin supplements could be used to cure mental illness.

Many people have suggested that magnets—or an electromagnetic field—could defeat cancers. This notion really goes back to the ideas of the eighteenth-century quack Franz Anton Mesmer, who promoted the idea of a mysterious bodily energy flow that he called animal magnetism. (In the process he discovered what we today call the hypnotic state, but that’s another story.) Through the nineteenth century, various perfectly sincere physicians—plus, of course, plenty of quacks—revealed the marvelous cures that magnets could effect.

Of all the US magnetic therapists of the nineteenth century, the most notorious must surely be C. J. Thacher, founder of the Chicago Magnetic Company and described by Colliers Magazine as the “king of the magnetic quacks.” Thacher claimed not only that all sorts of cures could be effected by the application of magnets but also that the wearing of magnets was the best way to assure one’s health and well-being. To this end, his mail-order catalog of 1866 advertised a huge range of magnetic garments; if you bought and wore a full set of these, you’d be the proud owner of, reportedly, over seven hundred therapeutic magnets.58 So insistent was Thacher about the therapeutic value of his magnets that it becomes almost tempting to believe he was genuine. But some of the stories he told of the cures he achieved—such as having paralysis victims up and walking within moments—make it plain he was a liar and quack.

Sadly, after a period in the doldrums, notions concerning the supposed therapeutic influence of magnets have come back into prominence in the guise of what is called magnetic therapy, magnetic field therapy, or magnetotherapy. One reason for the resurgence in the belief that magnets affect health was that, from the 1970s, some researchers began to suggest there might be a link between strong electromagnetic fields and cancer. This culminated in the early 1990s with various legal cases claiming that sufferers had developed cancers because of electromagnetic fields associated with the power lines or transformers near their homes. The lawyers for the plaintiffs were able to point at a scientific literature that offered some guarded support. Guarded or otherwise, the support soon withered and the cases were kicked out.

A US estimate early in the twenty-first century indicated that annual national sales of therapeutic magnets were anywhere between $200 and $500 million.

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