Snake oil and Homeopathy.
The phrase “snake oil pedlar” is a derogatory statement often made about the practices of homeopaths and other natural medicine practitioners, inferring that their products are of little or no medicinal value.
This is in fact an inappropriate use of the term.
‘Snake Oil’ is actually a product that originates in Asia, made from the water snake (Enhydris Chinensis), it is highly aquatic and mildly venomous in nature and commonly found in the paddy fields of China and neighbouring regions. The oil itself comes from the snake’s fat and contains a high concentration of Eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA).
Introduced into the USA in the 1880’s by the Chinese labourers as one of their traditional medicines, its efficacy in healing the aches and strains, common to Railroad workers was soon noticed by the fellow American labourers, who also found its use beneficial as a topical application rubbed into the skin.
As with all things “curative” there is an opportunity to make money, and during the latter years of the 19th Century a cottage industry manufacturing ‘tonics’ and ‘cure-alls’ developed, some even tried to reproduce the snake oil, however they substituted with the American Rattlesnake containing only very small quantities of EPA.
One Entrepreneur, a gentleman called Clark Stanley, made a lucrative career out of selling this oil, earning the name “Rattlesnake King” for his stage performance of slitting a live rattlesnake in half throwing it into boiling water and skimming off the fat to make Stanley’s snake oil on the spot. He was finally rumbled when, following many complaints from disappointed customers, a shipment of his ‘Stanley’s Snake Oil’ was seized, analyzed and found to be primarily mineral oil, beef fat, red pepper and turpentine and no snake oil whatsoever, resulting in the destruction of the reputation of the original medicine beneficially used by countless people for centuries.
It could be agued that it is the pharmaceutical industry and not the natural medicine practitioners and homeopaths who are todays Snake oil pedlars.
In a society where a “quick fix” solution to a problem is the requirement due to pressure of work and money on a generally stressed population, pharmaceutical companies sometimes resort to withholding negative information, or otherwise manipulating the results of drug trials in order to get a product on the market sometimes with devastating results.
e.g. the European Medicines Agency have been aware of the inherent dangers involved in the use of the Drug Sodium Valproate since 1974 but nothing had been done resulting in serious birth defects and developmental issues for many children in the UK alone.
Even Now, Sodium Valproate, used to control epileptic seizures and bi polar disorder, is still available, and in a recent poll 68% of 2000 women with epilepsy did not know of the damage associated with the prescription of this drug?
