Quack medicine : a history of combating health fraud in twentieth-century America / Eric W. Boyle.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction -- Quackery unmasked -- Rationalizing and regulating the therapeutic marketplace -- Marketing medicines in an age of reform -- Propaganda for reform -- A new deal for quackery -- Redefining quackery in the age of wonder drugs -- Reviving the anti-quackery crusade in the 1950s and 1960s -- Redefining quackery in the closing decades of the twentieth century.

This book "reveals how efforts to establish an exact border between quackery and legitimate therapeutic practices and medications have largely failed, and details the reasons for this failure. Digging beneath the surface, the book uncovers the history of allegedly fraudulent therapies including pain medications, obesity and asthma cures, gastrointestinal remedies, virility treatments, and panaceas for diseases such as arthritis, asthma, diabetes, and HIV/AIDS. It shows how efforts to combat alleged medical quackery have been connected to broader debates among medical professionals, scientists, legislators, businesses, and consumers, and it exposes the competing professional, economic, and political priorities that have encouraged the drawing of arbitrary, vaguely defined boundaries between good medicine and quack medicine."--Provided by publisher.