1220: Smoke and Mirrors-medical scams and outdated practices

·50 min·3 clips

Mercury poisoning helped inspire the phrase “mad as a hatter.”

1. Travel Medicine Podcast episode 1220 examines medical scams and outdated practices from Victorian and later periods. 2. Dr. Jay, an internal medicine doctor, and Dr. Santosh, a pediatric infectious disease doctor and researcher, lead the discussion and frame the history. 3. The episode asks how long questionable treatments and sales tactics have been around, from resuscitation to cosmetics to patent medicines. 4. Dr. Jay starts with a Super Bowl ad for a direct-to-consumer finger-prick blood test for cancer and links it to false positives and false negatives. 5. The hosts then narrow the history to the Victorian era, which they date as 1837 to 1901. 6. Their first case is the Society for the Recovery of Persons Apparently Drowned, formed around 1774 by William Hawes and Thomas Cogan. 7. The society offered two guineas for an attempted rescue, four guineas for a successful rescue, and one guinea for letting a person be treated in a house. 8. That reward structure led to a staged-drowning scam in which one person jumped into the water and another claimed the payment for rescue. 9. The rescue methods included tobacco smoke enemas at riverside stations, before the Sylvester method and later prone-pressure methods replaced them. 10. The episode then shifts to claims that Scottish brides, or sometimes people on their 21st birthday, had teeth removed and replaced with dentures. 11. Santosh explains that tooth loss can change the jaw because the bone is no longer stimulated by chewing. 12. They also cite a meta-analysis supported by NIA and led by a team at NYU that reviewed 14 studies from six biomedical databases. 13. That review covered around 34,000 participants and about 5,000 people with dementia. 14. The analysis reported a 48% higher risk of cognitive impairment and a 28% higher risk of dementia among people with more missing teeth. 15. It also found that people missing 20 or more teeth had a 31% higher risk of cognitive impairment and a 54% higher risk when all teeth were gone. 16. Participants with missing teeth who used dentures did not show a significantly higher risk of dementia than people without missing teeth. 17. Dr. Jay and Santosh keep the tone conversational, interrupting each other with jokes, clarifications, and small historical guesses. 18. The format mixes historical anecdotes, clinical explanation, and occasional fact-checking about chemistry, anatomy, and epidemiology. 19. People interested in medical history, dental health, and strange advertising will likely like this episode. 20. Listeners wanting a tightly focused modern clinical topic may skip it.

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