The American Faith in Miracle Cures—and the Hucksters Who Sell Them

The United States has long defined itself as a place where anything is possible. That belief has helped drive innovation, ambition, and economic growth. It has also made Americans especially vulnerable to hucksters, charlatans, and schemes built on impossible promises.

If anything can happen, then why not believe the next supplement, device, or treatment could make you younger, stronger, wealthier, or healthier almost overnight?

American history is full of such examples. Clark Stanley, the self-styled “Rattlesnake King,” sold a “snake oil liniment” that claimed to ease pain, lameness, sprains, bunions, and even “reduce large joints to their natural size.” Charles Ponzi promised investors a 50% return in just 45 days through a scheme involving postal reply coupons.

Those stories are easy to dismiss as relics of a less informed age. Yet Americans remain willing to believe claims that often collapse under even modest scrutiny. Does raw milk carry special health powers? Can peptides truly turn back aging? Can an IV drip of vitamins cure a hangover?

One explanation is simple: people are afraid of suffering, decline, and death.

Lydia Kang, MD, author of the book “Quackery” and an associate professor of internal medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, puts it bluntly: “People really don’t want to die.” She says the appeal of medical fads often comes from a powerful desire to live longer, with less pain, less disability, and a mind that remains intact.

This tendency is not unique to the United States. But in America, it is intensified by a culture of optimism, individualism, and a marketplace where regulation often lags behind promotion.

Truth Is Not Always the Point

When people embrace claims or continue believing them after they have been disproved, they are not necessarily acting irrationally in every sense.

Tali Sharot, PhD, a neuroscientist at University College London, has argued that beliefs are not always formed to create an accurate picture of the world. Instead, people often hold beliefs that offer rewards, reduce fear, or help them avoid harm. Sometimes those beliefs are accurate. Sometimes they are not.

Hope can improve mood and mental well-being, at least temporarily. “Believing that your future will be better than the past and the present—even if your future will not be better,” Sharot said, “many times can be optimal.”

That openness creates demand for supplements, balms, procedures, and techniques that promise benefits they are unlikely to deliver. Some are simply a waste of money. Others can carry real risks. Still, Sharot notes, people may gain something from trying: anticipation, excitement, or the feeling that they have taken action.

Hope Creates an Opening for Hype

Those same instincts also make people easy targets for companies looking to turn desperation into profit.

Across U.S. history, a familiar pattern has emerged. A small hint that something might work becomes an opening for sellers to rush in, offering certainty to people who are ill, afraid, exhausted, or searching for relief.

During the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, physician Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, struggled with his inability to save patients. After reading autopsy reports that suggested purging and bloodletting might help, he pushed those treatments to dangerous extremes. One account described so much blood spilled in a front yard that the area became foul-smelling and swarmed with flies.

Clark Stanley’s snake oil was also a fraud. In 1916, the U.S. Bureau of Chemistry found that his product was mainly mineral oil, with “fatty oil (probably beef fat), capsicum, and possibly a trace of camphor or turpentine.” The idea, however, had roots in remedies used by Chinese laborers, who relied on oil from a specific snake that likely did have anti-inflammatory properties.

Such gray areas create problems for regulators and health professionals. It is often difficult to prove definitively that a product does nothing. While that uncertainty remains, companies move quickly. “What’s scary is that they will take that hope and they will try to stick it in a bottle and sell it to you at whatever price that they think that you can afford,” Kang said.

Real Breakthroughs Fuel Bigger Promises

Science, technology, and American industry have produced genuine wonders. Those achievements, in turn, make exaggerated claims seem more believable.

People can cross the country in a metal aircraft. A handheld device can connect anyone to much of the world’s knowledge. Medical advances, especially vaccination, have nearly eliminated childhood diseases that once killed vast numbers of children. In 1900, an American could expect to live only about 47 years. Today, U.S. life expectancy is around 79. If life spans have grown so dramatically, why not imagine they could double again?

Now those hopes are amplified by social media, where influencers and online sellers promote “treatments,” shortcuts, and miracle claims to audiences trained by more than two centuries of pursuit of happiness.

Even powerful public figures have helped legitimize unproven treatments. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has promoted or amplified voices advocating or selling remedies that lack strong scientific support.

“The guard rails are off right now,” Kang said. “It’s actually worse than it has been before, because of social media, because of what’s on the internet, and because the so-called trusted people we’re supposed to be getting advice from are not trustworthy. And I think that puts the American public in far greater danger.”

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