Snake oil

Clark Stanley's Snake Oil Liniment. Accept no substitutes!

Snake oil is a term used for fake, fraudulent, and usually ineffective potions and nostrums. The expression is also applied metaphorically to any product with exaggerated marketing but questionable or unverifiable quality — such as bogus cryptography (see fraud in cryptography).

Snake Oil and Holy Water is also the title of a well-known essay by Richard Dawkins attacking alternative medicine, and Snake Oil is the title of a book by John Diamond on the same topic.

History

The term was originally used for a type of 19th century patent medicine sold in the U. S. that claimed to contain snake fat, supposedly an American Native remedy for various ailments. A classic example is Stanley's snake oil, produced by Clark Stanley , the "Rattlesnake King". His liniment, tested by the federal government in 1917, was found to contain mineral oil, 1% fatty oil (presumed to be beef fat ), red pepper, turpentine and camphor. (Note that this makes it similar in composition to modern-day capsaicin-based liniments. Thus, the original snake oil worked rather well as intended, not despite, but rather because it did not contain its alleged ingredients).

In time, snake oil became a generic name for any medicine, 'patented' or not, typically marketed as a panacea or miraculous remedy, whose ingredients were usually secret, unidentified, or mis-characterized, and mostly inert or ineffective. At best, such ingredients as alcohol, codeine, and stimulants, as well as the placebo effect, might provide some temporary relief for whatever the problem might have been. The term is usually derogatory as, in those cases for which effective remedies actually do exist, snake oil is form of quackery and can be damaging, up to and including, avoidable death. The title of Dawkins's essay (noted above) is an example of this use.

The snake oil peddler was an historical and folkloric figure of the American Old West, often featured in Western movies: a travelling "doctor" with dubious credentials, selling some patent medicine — such as snake oil — with boisterous marketing hype, often supported by pseudo-scientific evidence. Less scientifically, but perhaps even more effectively from an immediate sales viewpoint, an accomplice in the crowd would often 'attest' the value of the product in an effort to provoke buying enthusiasm. The "doctor" would prudently leave town before his customers realized that they had been cheated.

W. C. Fields hilariously (and probably not too inaccurately) portrayed a back-of-the-buckboard snake oil barker (complete with audience shill) on the American frontier in My Little Chickadee (1940). The English musician and comedy writer Vivian Stanshall satirised a miracle cosmetic as "Rillago - the great ape repellent" and many of J. B. Morton 's Beachcomber books and radio programmes included short spoof advertisements for "Snibbo" a fictional treatment allegedly tackling various unlikely human conditions.

The practice of selling dubious remedies for real (or imagined) ailments has hardly been limited to 19th century America. It still occurs today, even in "sophisticated" parts of the world. Only the marketing techniques have changed with the introduction of new methods of reaching potential victims (or as purveyors would perhaps prefer, 'purchasers' or 'customers').

In contemporary life, the use of performance enhancing chemicals (such as one or another variety of steroid) could be termed a kind of snake oil as the effects are often exaggerated, often useless or damaging, and prey on the gullibility of the would-be better performing athletes, whose response, when it all comes out, is often to the effect of "I didn't know it was ..." or "... that it would do ...". At least one professional athlete, American football player Lyle Alzado, attributed his health problems, and even his death, to his use of steroids.

See also

• Alchemy and elixir
• Goanna
• Golden hammer
• Magic bullet
• Silver bullet
• Universal panacea

External links

• Snake Oil History by CSICOP.
• The Snake Oil FAQ by Matt Curtin and others; pertaining to cryptographic snake oil.
• The 'Doghouse' section, a periodic part of Bruce Schneier's newsletter, Crypto-Gram; also pertaining to cryptographic snake oil.