Viewpoint: Return of the Medicine Men

No one estimated the number of ‘medicine men’ who posed as doctors of medicine during the frontier era of 1870 to 1910. Nor could one even hazard a guess at the number of deaths caused by quack physicians during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Meanwhile, we face a return of the snake oil men with all its attendant threats to life and limb. That this is possible stems from the mushrooming of bogus degree mill operators.