If It Sounds Like a Quack...

A Journey to the Fringes of American Medicine

By: Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

Narrated by: Jamie Renell

Length: 10 hrs and 38 mins

Publisher's summary

A Pulitzer Prize finalist's bizarre journalistic journey through the world of fringe medicine, filled with leeches, baking soda IVs, and, according to at least one person, zombies.

It's no secret that American health care has become too costly and politicized to help everyone. So where do you turn if you can't afford doctors, or don't trust them? In this book, Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling examines the growing universe of non-traditional treatments—including some that are really non-traditional.

With costs skyrocketing and anti-science sentiment spreading, the so-called "medical freedom" movement has grown. Now it faces its greatest challenge: going mainstream. In this book, you'll meet medical freedom advocates including an international leech smuggler, a gold miner-turned health drink salesman who may or may not be from the Andromeda galaxy, and a man who says he can turn people into zombies with aerosol spray. One by one, these alternative healers find customers, then expand and influence, always seeking the one thing that would take their businesses to the next level—the support and approval of the government.

Should the government dictate what is medicine and what isn't? Can we have public health when disagreements over science are this profound? No, seriously, can you turn people into flesh-eating zombies? If It Sounds Like a Quack asks these critical questions while telling the story of how we got to this improbable moment, and wondering where we go from here. Buckle up for a bumpy ride...unless you're against seatbelts.

©2023 Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling (P)2023 PublicAffairs

Critic reviews

“Prepare yourself for a wild ride. With a carefully calibrated balance of wit and horror, Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling leads readers into dark historical corners and down internet rabbit holes to understand the origins and influence of the ‘medical freedom’ movement. A book full of rich characters and shocking details about America’s war on science you won’t soon forget.”—Seyward Darby, author of Sisters in Hate

“Matt Double-H is a must-read writer for me, if only for the belly laughs. Here he spins a fantastically weird and entertaining tale about medical quackery in twenty-first century America and the faltering efforts of the government to curb it. Adds credence to the idea that we are living through a Counter-Enlightenment.”—Richard Grant, author of Dispatches from Pluto

“My jaw hit the floor and still hasn’t recovered. From the slimy secrets in hospital basements to preventable tragedies that elude the healing powers of God and magic, If It Sounds Like A Quack . . . tells unfathomably flabbergasting tales of the wacky world of American snake-oil sales. Readers will come away inoculated against the allure of any one true cure.”—Kavin Senapathy, SciMoms.com

Lots of connections to understand why our world has gone haywire.

Like one true cures, there is no one true reason why American, social and civic discourse has become unhinged in recent years. Nonetheless, this book offers a coherent set of observations, on the descent into pseudoscience that dovetail with the rise of extreme right nationalism and the destruction of civil and political institutions that form the basis of a functioning society. Often scathingly ironic in his commentary, Hongoltz-Hetling never loses compassion for the victims of medical quacks and tries to find more than the villain in the practitioners of quackery.

WOW! A Must Read!

Leeches, aliens, game show hosts, zombies, religion, avocados, cancer, bleach, Libertarians, the January 6th insurrection, experimenting on prisoners in Africa, baking soda--if you cannot imagine what all of these things have in common, Hongoltz-Hetling puts it all together for you!

I love reading books about medicine (see also Quackery, Dr. Mutter's Marvels, Diagnosis, Get Well Soon, Bad Faith, Weekends at Bellevue, Wicked Plants, The Butchering Art, Skeleton Keys, Heart, Epidemics, and all books by Atul Gawande), and this book starts off looking at a group of individuals who are quacks. Although coming from very different places, they all espouse medicine that is not really medicine.

As we get more into each person's story--and the damage they inflict--we also learn about others, a brief history of leeches in medicine, the FDA, and the hugely profitable supplement business (and the politicians who make tons of money from these quacks). As the book goes along, politics become a larger part of the narrative (as do deaths, lawsuits, and cost cases). We end up at Covid, and we have seen how certain groups of Americans had been primed by politics and certain "news" organizations, to shun vaccines, masks, and government decrees that benefit the greater good.

It is an absolutely fascinating history, and the people whose quackery we follow (the author speaks with most of them) all become interwoven, although they are all acting separately.

And the author does not just examine the quacks and the people making money off of them. He also examines the laws, the governmental organizations, and the media who play a part in their destructive behavior.

A great performance for a great book. A Must Read!

Excellent materialist analysis of the public’s ideology about medical care

Well written and able to cover dark subject matter without downplaying it or wallowing in it either. This is one of the most cohesive accounts I’ve seen of the actual material factors that have driven people to this insanity. My only complaint is that the author didn’t include the alternative care Lyme disease community except in passing. That’s just because of my own personal vendetta against them for treating what was actually lung cancer with bogus Lyme disease protocols. That said I’m sure there are unfortunately many other instances that could also not be included.

Overall excellent read and a compelling argument against the private, for profit medical system and a regulatory system that has been defunded and hollowed out.