Conspiracy Theorists and Con Men

This chapter discusses the 1930s through the 1960s, an anomalous period of American history in which the people’s confidence in major national institutions was at its peak. Most people trusted government health regulators, the medical establishment, and pharmaceutical companies to do the right thing. Consequently, medical freedom of choice activism occurred mainly on society’s margins, voiced by peddlers of fraudulent products and right-wing cranks. The most persistent and cantankerous promoter of medical freedom during this period was the National Health Federation (NHF), the publisher of “Health Freedom News.” This organization, founded by manufacturers of dietary supplements and quack medical devices, resisted FDA regulation of alternative treatments, as well as the fluoridation of municipal water supplies. Although the NHF sometimes exemplified paranoid, Red-Scare politics, it also employed more conventional libertarian arguments of the sort that infused medical freedom rhetoric in other periods of American history.