There have always been quacks, medicine has been riddled with them since at least the dawn of scientific medicine. There have always been people who peddle ineffective or dangerous ‘cure alls’ to the unwary and the uneducated. Also there have always been those who indulge in pseudoscience either to profit from those tempted to believe in such things or to try to give credence to baseless conspiracy theories such as those surrounding ‘chemtrails’ for example.

Sometimes quackery crosses over and melds with pseudoscience with horrific charlatans like the cancer quack David Noakes. Noakes and those like him prey on the desperate whether those faced with serious diseases or those who are looking for answers for their child’s medical condition. Noakes is a classic example of a quack using pseudoscience or baffling their victims with ‘science-y’ sounding words to drag their victims into their grasp.

Then we have those who look like scientists or doctors but whose path cannot be scientifically proven such the homeopathists. With homeopathy there is no link at all between the ‘medicines’ given and any outcome because the dilutions are so small. In any event much of the rationale behind homeopathy is quite frankly bullshit. The idea, the one behind homeopathy, that like can cure like, has long been discredited by real scientists.

When medicine was less advanced than it is today, at least in the West, it was somewhat understandable that desperate people would be hoodwinked by quacks. In a wild and rural area, such as in the American West in the mid to late 19^th century, where there were not many doctors and what doctors there were did not have the knowledge of today’s medics, the quacks had a ready market for their bullshit ‘cures’. Similarly in the early part of the 20^th century when the mystery of the structure of the atom was finally being solved and new radioactive elements were being discovered and created, pseudoscientists latched on to what looked like a miracle and played a major part in along with making massive profits out of disseminating dangerous Radium compounds to the public which were put in everything from ‘curative’ drinks to toothpaste. In that case it was only when the horrific cancers linked to Radium use started to appear that action was taken and Radium was taken off of the open market and put back into the more secure and controllable world of the physics and chemistry laboratories.

We quite rightly look back on those times with a feeling of horror. We feel horror about the people with diseases that today might be curable being palmed off with a bottle full of possibly dangerous and rubbish chemicals and we also feel horror at the plight of the Radium Girls who died terrible and painful deaths because of their use of Radium paint to create luminous clock faces.

So, we all know or should know more about science than we once did as a society. We should not have quacks and we should not have pseudoscience. They should be confined to the history books. But they are not. Quacks and pseudoscientists are still with us. Quackery and pseudoscience is still a part of the human belief system and it a large part of it can be found in what is often called the ‘wellness movement’. Here you will find diet fads, vitamin supplement fads, anti vaccination ideologues, those who question and dismiss well established germ theory, anti-fluoridation obsessives, those who believe that ‘organic’ food is superior to other foods and even, as I was once very disturbed to find out, those who promote the drinking and administering by way of enemas, of dangerous chemicals such as turpentine and bleach allegedly to cure everything from digestive disorders to autism.

We live in an age where there is literally a world of information at our fingertips yet still there are those who believe that vaccines are evil, that the Atkins diet is not dangerous, that tiny amounts of fluoride in drinking water are part of some ‘evil plot’ and that the old and discredited idea of the Miasma Theory of disease transmission is valid. We are in a situation which we in the West really should not be in. The West is built on science. Science was behind the Industrial Revolution and the Green Revolution in agriculture that allows the world to feed many more people than would be possible with purely organic means. It is science, and specifically vaccination that is the reason why I do not fear my child getting Smallpox or Whooping Cough or any other of the killer diseases that once carried off so many children before their fifth birthday. Hopefully one day vaccination will prevent him from getting any of the current scourges such as HIV or Covid or one of the various awful diseases like Ebola that might one day cross the world due to our modern day interconnectedness.

So why do we still have so many quacks and pseudoscientists and people willing to listen to them? Part of the reason is I would say the aforementioned ‘wellness movement’. This is because those who are obsessed with keeping themselves healthy and who may live in countries where sensible credible medicine is prohibitively expensive, I’m looking at you USA, want to keep as healthy and therefore as wealthy as possible. I’m seeing a connection between those who want to avoid paying high medical bills and those who are attracted to fad diets, the excessive use of vitamin supplements and other similar quackery. A overly distrustful attitude to the medical profession because of the costs involved in getting medical help may also contribute to a tendency to lean towards quackery. Whilst I have no love for the socialist monstrosity that is Britain’s NHS, I also cannot help but notice that much of the quackery from the Wellness Movement, through fad diets etc and anti vaccination ideologies, all seem to come from the nation with the most expensive but least accessible healthcare system, which is the United States.

But I don’t believe that it is just the Wellness Movement and their activities that explain why we are still plagued with quackery and pseudoscience. I’m coming around to the idea that a lack of decent science education is a major factor in why we are still having to deal with quacks and fraggles pushing their wares.

As I said earlier, the West is built on science. Science allowed the West to circumnavigate the globe, to create new technologies that improved everything from transport to communication, which created a medical revolution that meant that unlike previous generations who because they had to rely on natural immunity to disease, too often died at forty or fifty.

The problem is, in the West at least, we have neglected science education. Teaching the basic knowledge of science whether that be biology, chemistry or physics, doesn’t seem to be as important to Western nations as it once was. We can find time in school curricula for all sorts of faddish nonsense but we do not teach and promote science to the extent that we should. Science is what put a man on the moon but we seem to be teaching a whole generation that it’s their right to demand the moon on a stick because of who they are.

Arthur C Clarke writing in one of the sequels to his masterpiece 2001, mused that even in the year 2061 which is when this sequel is set, there will still be a significant number of people who cannot understand that communication cannot go faster than the speed of light. I really hope that Mr Clarke was wrong and that the future does not contain a large number of ill informed and ignorant people. If we are going to avoid this sort of situation along with avoiding a worsening of our current situation with regards to quacks and pseudoscientific charlatans, then we need to sort out scientific education and make it something for every child and not just the best and brightest. Every child, from the brightest to the slowest, needs to be given a basic grounding in how the world and the universe works. Unless we, not just in Britain but across the world, improve our children’s science education then there will always be a large pool of people who will be sucked into baseless conspiracy theories like chemtrails or science denying cults like that of Flat Earth or the complete fruitloopery that is the anti-vaccination movement. I’ve seen people conned out of time and money by quacks and pseudoscience charlatans pushing everything from flower remedies, to reiki, to extreme diets and hypnotic regression. I’d much rather see a world where people had such a level of science education that it would be mostly impossible for them to fall victim to such mountebanks. Let’s hope that this time comes soon and that it puts the quacks and pseudoscience promoters out of business.