unSpun Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation

Chapter 1 From Snake Oil to Emu Oil A century ago a self-proclaimed cowboy named Clark Stan- ley, calling himself the Rattlesnake King, peddled a product he called Snake Oil Liniment. He claimed it was "good for man and beast" and brought immediate relief from "pain and lameness." Stanley sold it for 50 cents a bottlethe equivalent of more than $10 todayas a remedy for rheumatism, toothache, sciatica, and "bites of animals, insects and reptiles," among other ailments. To promote his pricey cure-all, Stanley publicly slaughtered rattlesnakes at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. Stanley was the most famous of the snake-oil salesmen, back before passage of the federal Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906. And he was a fraud. When the federal government finally got around to seizing some of Stanley's product in 1915, the Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Chemistry (forerunner of today's Food and Drug Administration) determined that it "consisted principally of a light mineral oil (petroleum product) mixed with about 1 per cent of fatty oil (probably beef fat), capsicum, and possibly a trace of camphor and turpentine." And no actual snake oil. Stanley was charged with violating the federal food and drug act. He didn't contest the charge and was fined $20. Are today's pitchmen and hucksters any less deceptive? We don't think so. "Snake oil" has a bad name these days (at least in the United States; in China, it is used to relieve joint pain). But in 2006 we found another animal-oil product thataccording to its marketeris "much better than Botox! [and] Makes Wrinkles Almost Invisible to the Naked Eye! . . . Look as much as 20-years younger . . . in less than one minute." The maker even claims that the product won't just hide wrinkles, with repeated use it may eliminate them: "It is possible your wrinkles will no longer even exist." The name of the product is Deception Wrinkle-Cheating Cream. How appropriate. According to Planet Emu, the marketer, this scientific miracle contains "the only triple-refined emu oil in the world," but we quickly determined that this product is nothing more than triple-refined hokum. Emus are those big, flightless Australian birds; the oil is said to be an ancient Aboriginal remedy. But when we asked Planet Emu for proof of their claims, they cited only one scientific study of emu oil's cosmetic properties, and it had nothing to do with wrinkles. It found that emu oil was rated better than mineral oil as a moisturizer by eleven test subjects. We searched the medical literature for ourselves and found some scanty evidence that emu oil may promote healing of burns in rats. We found no testing of emu oil as a wrinkle cream, much less any testing that compared it with Botox. That's where a century of progress in product promotion has gotten us: from baseless claims for snake oil to baseless claims for emu oil. The products change, but the techniques of deception (small "d") are as underhanded now as they were in the days of Clark Stanley. Meanwhile the price has gone up. "Deception" emu-oil wrinkle cream, at $40 for three quarters of an ounce, costs four times more than a bottle of its snake-oil forebear, even after adjusting for a century of inflation. Bunk is fairly typical of beauty products. "All the cosmetics companies use basically the same chemicals," a former cosmetics chemist, Heinz J. Eiermann, told The Washington Post way back in 1982. "It is all the same quality stuff." Eiermann was then head of the Food and Drug Administration's division of cosmetics technology. HisJamieson, Kathleen Hall is the author of 'unSpun Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation', published 2007 under ISBN 9781400065660 and ISBN 1400065666.