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0:00:00
Ben Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So let’s square the strange.

(MUSIC)

0:00:10
Celestia Ward: Hey, everybody, welcome back to Squaring the Strange. I’m Celestia Ward and with me as always….

BR: Oh, that’s my cue. I’m Ben, Ben Radford.

0:00:34
CW: Episode 85 here, we’re going to be discussing miracle oils and tinctures and strange elixirs that are said to cure all things. There’s interesting folklore angles, right, Ben?

0:00:58
BR: There are. Yeah, I was, we were talking about pulling the show together, figuring out, OK, what what exactly does that mean? Right? So I was sort of thinking miracle oils, ointments and salves.

0:01:09
CW: Yes. What you’d see on the side of a wagon pulled by a guy selling stuff squeezed out of snakes, right?

0:01:18
BR: Exactly. Or rather, a Harry Potter.

CW: Potent potions and potables.

0:01:22
BR: Exactly, exactly. And, you know, of course, you can find them everywhere. There’s all sorts of different versions of it. There’s lots and lots. We’re only going to be able to cover a couple of them. My first inkling of these sorts of things was playing Dungeons and Dragons.

0:01:38
CW: Oh, okay.

0:01:39
BR: Yeah, so when I was not worshiping Satan in the mid-80s and eating babies and all the normal things that D&D kids apparently did that I missed out on, there were all sorts of potions and whatnot. Most of them were ones that you drink, potions of invisibility, this and that. For those modern-day folk, there is a restorative ointment, which last time I checked cost, I think, 4,000 gold pieces. It neutralizes poison and cures light wounds. 1d8 plus 5 for you D&D nerds. So there’s those sorts of things. And of course, as you mentioned, folklore is a big part of it. And I’ve written about unicorns before. And one of the great things about unicorns is, of course, their horn. And their horn was valued partly for its ability, its alleged ability, I should say, to neutralize poison and purify water and cure disease. So it’s when you might, you know, grind it up into a salve and put it on and presumably unicorn horns would do almost as good as the restoritive ointment.

0:02:39
CW: Well, yeah, grinding up the horn of an endangered animal species is a little too close to reality. And unfortunately, we do have a lot of real life cases of these apparent magical elixirs being touted as good for everything from acne to erectile dysfunction to cancer to you name it. So we’re going to take a look at a few of those. And before that though, I wanted to do a little bit of chit-chat here. I wanted to say thank you and tell listeners I got the coolest baby gift sent to me by a listener and longtime friend of the show, Lar DeSouza. And Ben, you would love this book. It is an adorable little baby book called The Monster Alphabet. And I also got the monster numbers too.

0:03:27
BR: Monster alphabet. I’m trying to figure out what that would be. Is it like B is for Bigfoot type thing?

0:03:32
CW: I’m trying to tell you. It’s like all filled with these folkloric animals. And it’s an adorable little baby book here and why don’t you pick a letter and I’ll read you one.

0:03:43
BR: R.

0:03:44
CW: R. Let’s go to R. Let’s see R is after Q and there we go. R is for Reiju staying so calm until the thunder. In a panic it’ll tear the fields and fields asunder. And then it has a little fun fact thing. Reiju, origin Japanese, fun facts. Trees struck by lightning are said to be scraped by his claws. He likes to sleep in the navel of humans. So superstitious people sleep on their belly during bad weather. Interesting.

0:04:17
BR: It sounds very Japanese Kaiju-ish. I like it.

0:04:20
CW: Yeah, cool. Okay. Anyway, another thing about Lar De Souza, he is an awesome human being and an amazingly prolific cartoonist. And I wanted to plug something that he’s doing right now if any listeners are interested in getting some artwork of themselves. He is right now through February 28th doing custom avatars of people. And all you have to do to get a custom avatar drawn by Lar de Souza in a Hanna-Barbera style, he kind of picks a different cartoon style. He’s an amazing chameleon of cartooning. He can imitate most any cartoon style he lays his eyes on. And he’s doing Hanna-Barbera style characters of people. If you want to see what you’d look like in the Fred Flintstone or Jetsons universe, donate $40 to the MS Society to help with multiple sclerosis research. And you have to just send him the link, send him your little receipt thing and he will do a custom avatar for a donation of $40 or more. Go to his Facebook page which is Public, again Lar De Souza, D-E capital S-O-U-Z-A, he’s a cartoonist out of Canada, a wonderful human being and I’ve gotten a couple of avatars in the past, I know Ben you have too, right?

0:05:35
BR: And yeah, in fact, just as of recording now, my current Facebook avatar is one done by Lar and it’s awesome. I asked him for one in the style of one of my favorite artists, Rene Magritte, and it was beautiful. It was perfect. It was better than I could have hoped. He just did this brilliant job. And yeah, I remember I’ve met Lar a couple of times through the caricature conventions and he is just an amazing, colorful, in several different ways, guy. And yes, I’ve been astonished at his variety of styles.

0:06:08
CW: Yeah, he does not disappoint.

0:06:11
BR: No, he’s amazing. So I would highly recommend that. It’s very cool.

0:06:15
CW: Okay. And lastly, I wanted to tell you, I don’t know if you and Pascual knew this, but Scary Stories is coming to the big screen. Have you seen, did you see the Super Bowl ad? No, of course you didn’t see the Super Bowl ads. Did you know there was a Super Bowl?

0:06:29
BR: I heard about it. I was working on my book and this is a true story, I’m not making this up. I took a break from reading my book to see what was on 60 Minutes, which was CBS and I’m like, oh, there’s a football…. But yes, I heard something about this bowl of which you speak.

0:07:11
CW: Yes, they had the first trailers showing during the Super Bowl. Scary stories to tell in the dark. That children’s book that we have talked about before by Alvin Schwartz.

BR: Yes.

CW: The creepy clown on the front of the cover and everything. Really, really neat stuff. Del Toro is producing and it looks like the film is directed by a fellow named Andre Overdahl. I’m not sure how to pronounce that. It’s got a little weird. Yeah, he looks kind of Scandinavian there. Andre Overdal from a script by Del Toro and Daniel and Kevin Hageman, who did the Lego movie.

BR: And of course, Del Toro did Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water and others.

0:07:50
CW: Yeah, visually stunning. I can’t imagine anything that he’s touched not turning out at least to be a beautiful thing to look at. Beautifully creepy too. So I’m looking forward to seeing what he can do.

0:08:04
BR: Absolutely.

0:08:05
CW: Moving right along, is there anything you’re skeptical of this week, Ben?

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0:08:13
BR: Should I do a little cute rustling of the paper or not?

CW: If you want.

BR: Okay. In fact, there is. Hold on a second. These are high profile, expensive sound effects here, guys. This is this is me reaching for The New York Times.

0:08:27
CW: This has been doing his impersonation of Rachel Maddow.

BR: There we go. Yes, I had someone came across my well, came across my desk on The Times. There are a couple of pieces in actually last week and there were two stories that jumped out at me and I’ll summarize them very quickly and I’ll just briefly touch on the themes. One of them is titled, Inmate Told Her Guards I’m Going to Die Here, But They Didn’t Listen. And it’s a case in Indiana. There was a black woman named Lameke Adakri who was booked into a corrections facility in Elkhart community, and she died at age 36. And there was a big scandal about it because, as it turned out, she died of sepsis, and she had stomach problems. She was calling out for guards, saying that she wasn’t feeling well, she was sick, and the guards said that because she had been booked under the influence of drugs, they had assumed that she was just dealing with drug withdrawal. So the officers, they arguably dismissed or well, they don’t look at it, but the officers claimed that they didn’t dismiss her complaints that they they attributed to the fact that she was just withdrawing from drugs. And that was why she was she was saying she wasn’t feeling well.

0:10:04
CW: I could easily see how two opposing viewpoints could frame this. Either the headline could read heartless officers ignored dying woman’s medical issues or drug use camouflage symptoms of a deadly problem.

0:10:18
BR: Yeah, and that’s that was sort of what jumped out at me was the the idea that You know sort of the idea of on second thought right? I mean, so it seems like so often in today’s society There’s just the first thought there’s the knee-jerk Oh, this is clearly what this is and people get upset and outraged and this not sometimes justifiably sometimes not but in this case again, there was a plausible reason for that and there the article doesn’t have it doesn’t give any reason to think that she was being deliberately ignored because of her race, for example, or her gender, except insofar as maybe they assumed that she was maybe more likely to have drugs or whatever. But the point is that, again, there was this tragic thing that happened, and the initial assumptions that we all make, in this case, just happened to be wrong. So the initial story about it sort of took a sideways turn. And then the second piece on the same day is titled, Fall Didn’t Cause Woman’s Death in Subway, Medical Examiner Suggests. And this was about another woman that died in a Manhattan subway station a couple weeks back. I remember the story pretty well. It was made in the national news, made the newspaper, and it was about this woman who was going down the steps, and she fell down the steps and she died. And there was all this commentary about, you know, they need to fix the subway steps. And, you know, why didn’t bystanders come and help her, you know, help her? She was carrying a baby. The baby was fine, but she.

CW: Oh, wow.

0:11:58
BR: Yeah, the baby was fine. So there was so there was all this commentary about the dangers of Manhattan subway steps. And, you know, the elevators are broken, things like that. And they said, look, this woman died, you know, on the subway. And it later turned out that apparently she didn’t die from the fall. So it seems that she seems that she had maybe a heart attack or something else happened unrelated to the fall.

0:12:17
CW: So the fall was the fall was a result of what caused her death, not a not a thing that caused her death.

0:12:25
BR: Exactly. So once again, we see the initial assumptions, oh my God, this woman slipped on the steps and we need to fix the steps in the subway, which may in fact be true. But on the other hand, again, it’s which one caused the other. If she had a seizure or a heart attack or something walking down the steps and falls down, then you’re not going to know the truth of the matter until you actually do a medical examination. You realize that the fall didn’t cause her death.

0:12:56
CW: Now this is not to say that nothing like this ever happens and prison guards never ever ignore an inmate’s medical condition or steps are always completely safe and companies never try to cut corners on safety measures. Not to state that, but I have noticed that it’s a big media furor if a person dies and there is a way to make some entity culpable for it. And so they jump on that and I understand that. I’m human. I have that same nature too. You want to find a reason for something, especially if it’s a female who dies.

0:13:33
BR: Yeah, I mean, you find, you know, it’s a case of where people want answers. They want to know why something happened and they want to understandably try and prevent it, right? I mean, how can we keep this from happening again? And in this case, for example, in the woman that died in the jail custody, you can train the guards better to say, OK, just because, you know, they may in fact be coming off drug withdrawal does not mean that, you know, that’s what’s causing it. It could be something that’s masking. And the same thing with the fall in the subway.

0:14:11
CW: Yeah, yeah. There’s, you know, if per chance there actually are measurable safety violations, if they’re missing handrails or, you know, some of the thing about the stairs, then the fact that this woman unrelatedly died in the subway, if that got a few things fixed, then alright. But as a woman of size, I’ve noticed a similar sort of vein across my Facebook crawl. There’s been quite a few articles thrown my way and quite a few other friends I have who are overweight females. A common refrain is, doctors don’t listen to your complaints because you’re an overweight woman. They just assume everything that’s wrong with you is, oh, you’re experiencing back pain, well, you need to lose weight. Oh, you’ve got, you know, X, Y, Z, you know, going on, well, it’s due to your weight.

BR: Yes, this sort of assumption that, and actually, of course, feeds into a much broader assumption that doctors are dismissive and they don’t have time for you, they don’t care, they’re just all about making money and big farming this and that.

0:15:18
CW: Yes, it’s specifically dismissive towards women and there’s a bent towards this is due to misogyny and fat shaming in the medical industrial complex. I got to say personally I haven’t experienced that. I’ve kind of experienced the opposite where my doctor found higher levels of something that indicated I have inflammation way back when and he’s like, we got to test you for rheumatoid arthritis. And I said, I really don’t think I have that. I’m sore and everything because at the time I was skating roller derby and I was banging myself up a lot and I was a large woman.

0:15:55
BR: That would be it. Oh, the roller derby. Yeah. There you go. That would be why you’re sore.

0:16:01
CW: I said, I’m hauling all of this around and banging it up every week. I think it’s just due to that. He’s like, no, these are pretty high. We better test for this. And so as a result, he was actually overcautious and looked into medical reasons that my fat may have been masking. But even if he didn’t, I got to say, when you’re a doctor, you know, you’re not… Your job is to find the most likely reason for something just like an auto mechanic. Yeah an auto mechanic it’s their job to find the most likely reason why your check engine light came on It’s not their job to spend 85,000 hours looking at all the little tiny possibilities It might be you go to the most obvious thing first.

0:16:44
BR: And it’s the same thing with for example police investigation. If you have a homicide the the police know and criminologists know who the most likely suspect is and that is probably someone You know, yeah, that’s not always the case but but you know homicide investigation you first look at family members and friends and associates and After you’ve ruled that out after you’re sure that that’s not the case Then you expand the the pool of suspects to much less likely suspects like serial killers or just random attacks.

0:17:16
CW: Yeah. And yeah. And like I said, it would it would be malpractice if the doctor didn’t say this is likely caused by the fact that you have an extra eighty five pounds on you that you shouldn’t have now. Now, this isn’t to say if you keep coming back and you have multiple complaints and if you keep getting dismissed and there’s there’s something more going on and your doctor will not listen, then you’ve got a problem doctor. But I don’t, you know, I find it hard to have that knee-jerk reaction and just say, oh, the doctor’s being misogynist and fat-shaming me instead of looking at what the problem really is. Just like I would be hard-pressed to say, oh, those prison guards are being unfeeling and misogynistic and whatever else by not taking that woman’s stomach complaints seriously. If she was in the process of detoxing and she came in under the influence of drugs and you commonly see stomach cramps or something with coming off of whatever drug she was on, then it’s logical to think they would assume that. In this case, don’t ascribe to malice what can be explained with competence. That’s a competent assessment.

0:18:29
BR: Right. And of course, in the case of doctors, there is not just a financial but a medical ethical obligation to, if anything, over-diagnose. Right? I mean, it is, it is, if a doctor doesn’t do that, they can be sued because then the question is, well, how did you miss these diagnoses? And like, well, I didn’t really think, or they’re like, you knew that this was a possibility, you didn’t look into it. Well, right. I mean, I, you know, in my medical experience and practice, this is the most likely one. So we begin with that.

0:19:04
CW: Yeah. Yeah. But you, differential diagnosis is a, is a necessary thing in the medical industry. The doctor will tell you it’s most likely X, it could be Y or Z, but you know if you have a problem that might resolve if you lose 50 pounds, you know, again just like fixing the subway stairs, if the woman’s death resulted in some safety things being fixed, all the better. If your doctor saying that your problem is likely caused by your extra 50 pounds and you go ahead and lose that extra 50 pounds in an effort to solve the problem, even if your extra weight was just masking the problem, at least you’ve lost the weight. That will help get you to what the actual problem is.

0:19:50
BR: No, I agree with you, but look at it this way. So, let’s say the woman falls down the steps and as a result of the publicity, taxpayers were on the hook for an extra $200,000 to renovate the subway steps on the assumption and the premise that the steps are inherently dangerous because, hey, didn’t you see, you know, six months ago this woman died on the steps.

0:20:12
CW: You have a point there.

0:20:13
BR: And, you know, meanwhile, you put this, you know, this public taxpayer dollars at work fixing something that honestly probably didn’t need to be fixed if her death was unrelated to the steps themselves.

0:20:27
CW: You make a good point. I can’t, yeah, it can go in multiple directions, some good, some bad.

0:20:33
BR: Exactly, so anyway, we didn’t want to bring the house down, but it’s just the theme here was sort of the initial assumptions about things and how sometimes the initial assumptions about things are plausible, but not necessarily correct.

0:20:47
CW: Yes, and before you get your emotions all fired up into things and convince yourself it’s absolutely the case, you know, wait, wait for the coroner’s report.

BR: Right. Just wait. You know, you don’t need to you don’t need to get outraged at the first reports of anything. The first reports about anything in the news are invariably wrong in significant ways.

0:21:03
CW:

BR: We should do a show on that.

CW: I think we have. Anyway, okay. Yes, we have. Now let’s get into our main topic and talk about some oily stuff.

0:21:25
BR: Let’s do it.

(MUSIC)

0:21:41
BR: So, on to miracle oils, ointments, and salves. I just like saying the word salve.

CW: The word elixir kind of has a nice pleasant ring to it.

BR: Yeah, elixorial adventures.

0:22:00
CW: Sounds almost like excelsior.

0:22:01
BR: Yes, yes.

0:22:02
CW: Elixir. What can you tell us about the folklore and history of oils and salves and elixirs?

0:22:08
BR: And elixirs of all types. Well, as I mentioned before, there’s lots of different angles and approaches to it, so I’ll just sort of touch on a few. I want to begin by talking about snake oil.

0:22:22
CW: Snake oil.

0:22:24
BR: Snake oil. Partly because it’s just a cool word. It’s kind of creepy and weird. And it’s like, what is snake oil? A lot of people don’t know. Was it real? Was it not real? What is it? So of course, for most skeptics and probably most listeners of the show, snake oil is bogus medication.

CW: Yeah, stuff that’s claimed to be a cure-all but is actually, well I want to say worthless oil, but if you’re actually milking a snake for oil, it’s probably going to be expensive.

BR: Those milk mammaries are pretty, oh hold on, they’re not mammals. Okay, well anyway. Yes, well in fact, Joe Nickell has done all sorts of stuff on snake oil. I remember back when I was working at the Buffalo office, I would love to go down the steps and pop my head into his office. And for a while there, he had outside of his door, a cabinet and it would have snake oil things in it. And he actually had a rattlesnake that was putting out this venom. It was a stuffed one. And he would have snake oil bottles.

0:23:38
CW: OK.

0:23:39
BR: So I was I always loved seeing Joe’s snake oil stuff. And if you ever get a chance to stop in the Center for Inquiry in Buffalo and Amherst, stop in and ask Joe to see his snake oil stuff and he’ll be delighted to show you. But there actually was such a thing as snake oil. So, you know, even though modern days snake oil is sort of just assume this this generally bogus thing. In fact, there was at one point this oil of snakes and it was used by some Native Americans reportedly to treat various problems including rheumatism. You know, when we think of oils, we often think of, you know, something you might see in the supermarket, like vegetable oil or olive oil. This, you know, think back a couple hundred years, this is not sort of the refined oil that we might think of. It’s not it’s more sort of rattlesnake grease is probably closer.

0:24:31
CW: How how how would this how would they get this rattlesnake grease? Do I want to know?

0:24:37
BR: It involves squeezing snakes. I will. This is not PETA friendly. But yeah, the there was a there’s in the 1800s. There were stories of people who would, particularly trappers, because of course trappers are out in the woods and they’re encountering all sorts of critters out there, and they would grab snakes and they would extract the oil and grease from their bodies. Now of course, it’s not all oil. I’m sure there’s other impurities, other juices in snakes that are probably…

0:25:12
CW: Now just to be clear, we’re not talking about venom. We’re not talking about them putting the fangs on a little rubber covered cup and collecting venom. We’re talking about like the oil that makes their scales pliable and such, like the body oil?

0:25:25
BR: Well again, I mean keep in mind that in the 1800s and before, around that time, you know, a lot of what was sold was… there was no FDA. There weren’t clear labels on anything. It was just sort of like, this is snake oil, and what’s in it? Well, it’s what you get when you squeeze a snake.

0:25:45
CW: Okay, so it’s really not clear exactly.

0:25:48
BR: Right. Presumably, it was the grease that many animals have, of course, with humans and other things as well. So presumably, it was largely the natural oils and grease and probably other fluids in snakes. So Joe has written about this, you can find this online, it’s a good little breakdown, but he actually found seven different types of snake oil.

0:26:12
CW: Oh.

0:26:13
BR: Right, so the actual snake oil that we’re talking about, so at one point there actually apparently was genuine snake oil. For example, Joe talks about an 1830s store ledger that sold snake oil for 25 cents. There’s bottles that actually say snake oil on them. And then there were bottles that had snake oil as an ingredient. So this wouldn’t be pure snake oil, it’s a bunch of other oils, maybe from dubious sources, maybe not, that allegedly had snake oil as part of it.

0:26:49
CW: So adulterated snake effluvia.

0:26:52
BR: Exactly, that would, snake oil sounds better, but adulterated snake effluvia is, that’s a good rock band name. And then there was also, again, I won’t go into all of them, you can read them online, but then there were things that were snake oil that was not actually snake oil, but was called snake oil, because at the time, it didn’t have the negative connotation it does today. Today, all snake oil is by definition bogus. That’s what that means. But in the 1800s, snake oil was like, oh yeah, that stuff works.

0:27:25
CW: Okay.

0:27:27
BR: So, yeah, so there’s actual snake oil, there’s stuff that is said to have snake oil in it, there’s stuff that may or may not have snake oil in it, and all sorts of different permutations. So that in a nutshell is the down low on snake oil. Moving on from snake effluvia, as you so delicately called it, another fascinating aspect of oils and liniments and elixirs was the ointments allegedly used by witches.

0:27:56
CW: Witches, you say? They primarily used newt effluvia, right? Not snakes.

BR: Eye of newt? Yes, famously, a famous ingredient. Many newt eyes were plucked and eaten and ground up.

0:28:14
CW: Now, are we talking like witches of old, like during the time of like Macbeth’s witches? Or are we talking about modern day African people being accused of witchcraft? Or Haitian practitioners of voodoo or what are we talking about?

0:28:29
BR: Another good question. So really the connection to witch oils or witch ointments is really first sort of emerged in early modern Europe. There are two different versions of this, which makes it really interesting. So even during that time, there were of course skeptics. There were people like Reginald Scott who didn’t believe in witches, but they still had to answer the question, well, why is it that many people, many women, were admitting to using this liniment? And what they said is it made them fly.

0:29:03
CW: They claimed that the ointment made them fly.

0:29:06
BR: Yes.

0:29:07
CW: Okay.

0:29:08
BR: Yes, so it was believed, again, in early modern Europe, that one of the abilities of witches was of course flying on broomsticks and the idea was that they would get away at night and then they would often to go meet up with the devil and other witches in some faraway location and have their Sabbath rites during the night. Then the question is how do they get there, right? Well, you have to fly and then you get into broomsticks and these sorts of things but but but before the broomsticks the belief was that witches used this this ointment to help them fly.

CW: Okay.

BR: So yeah so the question then became well hold on here if if you’re a skeptic and you don’t believe that witches actually exist other than of course the modern Wiccan witches which obviously exist but if you know the sort of classic supernatural imbued witches. If you don’t think they exist, then the question is, well, hold on. Why are many of them claiming that they can fly? And they’re saying that they have this ointment. So the skeptics said it was due to the ointments inducing hallucinations.

0:30:17
CW: Oh, that sounds a little bit more believable than flying.

0:30:21
BR: It’s a step down. It’s sort of like between Superman and Hunter S. Thompson, I guess. There’s a little, there’s a…

0:30:29
CW: Were these ointments perchance made from toads or mushrooms or…

0:30:36
BR: Well, many of them, often it was things like belladonna and henbane and mandrake. So there were a variety of organic compounds and herbs that were used in this.

0:30:47
CW: Those can be potent things.

0:30:50
BR: They can. And so the belief for those who doubted that witches actually existed insofar as, you know, communing with the devil and this and that, they believe that, well, when they claim that they actually went out of their body and they went up into the night and they were flying, they put this ointment on there and they had these drug-induced hallucinations that eventually wore off, and that’s why they’re reporting some of these flying things. Others said, no, the witches are real. Believers said that, no, that the witches are actually flying. But they said it wasn’t due to the ointment. It was instead due to Satan.

CW: OK, all right. OK.

0:31:28
BR: Yeah. So this so there’s different flavors of plausibility here. So so the believer in witchcraft admitted that yes, the witches were indeed getting up in the middle of the night, unnoticed, and flying off to go to the woods and kiss Satan on his bottom and do all sorts of…

0:31:52
CW: But the idea that they were doing it by means of an ointment or salve was just ridiculous.

0:31:58
BR: Yeah, that’s just, that’s absurd. I don’t know where you’re getting that.

0:32:01
CW: That’s where they could. That’s what they couldn’t handle. Okay.

0:32:04
BR: That was the line that had been crossed. But they said, so no, so their ability to fly was diabolical. It came from Satan. It didn’t have anything to do with this ointment. However, they did believe that the witches did in fact had this ointment. And it was made from baby fat.

0:32:22
CW: Oh.

0:32:23
BR: One description comes from Francis Bacon Silva Severum from 1627, and he describes it now it is in 1620s English so it sounds a little weird but this is the quote. The ointment that witches use is reported to be made of the fat of children digged up out of their graves, of the juices of smallage, wolfbane, and sinkfoil mingled with the meal of fine wheat. But I suppose the sepiphorus medicines are like us to do it, which are henbane, hemlock, mandrake, moonshade, tobacco, opium, saffron, poplar leaves, etc.” So this was the ointment that was said to be used by witches, although not necessarily to levitate, but just that’s what they had around there. So that’s, there you go.

CW: Wow. Okay. Well, I Don’t know about you, but I’m just gonna stick with witch hazel

0:33:19
BR: Which leads me to one final example of people using the oil or fat of Well as we just mentioned in the case of which is allegedly babies mixed in with mandrake and tobacco and opium But in another case did I ever tell you about my research into the leaky cheery?

CW: No, you didn’t. What’s that?

BR: Well, we should do a show on that. But in a nutshell, the Leaky Cheery is a vampire that is said to dwell in the Andes of South America. And I wrote about this in my Chupacabra book briefly because, again, it’s a vampire.

CW: Is it like an animal vampire or like a human vampire?

BR: It’s a human vampire. And it’s a career. It’s a profession, it’s something that people do. And the belief is that the Likichiri will attack people late at night, often on overnight buses, overnight trains, when people are traveling.

0:34:16
CW: So it’s a modern belief, people right now believe that it’s out there.

0:34:20
BR: Yes.

0:34:21
CW: Okay.

BR: It’s a modern belief of a much older and larger vampire belief. And the belief is that, and yes, it happens in modern day Bolivia and Peru and elsewhere. So this is something that people believe in at this moment in parts of South America. And the idea is that the Likicuri steals fat.

0:34:47
CW: Where can I meet them?

0:34:49
BR: In Peru and Bolivia if you want to go down there. So it’s an interesting version of the vampire right because it’s not when we typically think of vampires we think of taking blood but blood isn’t the only isn’t the only bodily juice that can be taken by vampire and so in this particular case it is fat and the fat is said to be sold to cosmetic companies, well, very specifically American Western cosmetics companies for various purposes.

0:35:19
CW: So there’s this there’s this belief that it’s like it actually it’s actually a cult of vampires called the what was it? The Lipo Sucky or the… The Leaky Fury.

BR: Well, again, I don’t want to talk about too much about it because we’ll do a show on that at some point.

0:35:32
CW: That’s fascinating stuff. Yeah, well, it all kind of reminds me of the blood libel thing, too, of some strange outsider group stealing the blood, bones, or fat of your children to do some sort of strange magic with it. And speaking of beliefs in strange magic and elixirs, we’re going to move on to a much more modern day, much more accepted form of magical oil, and oil and one that many people find essential these days, if you know what I mean.

0:36:08
BR: Essential? Hold on, is there a pun there? What podcast am I on?

CW: Well, a pretty lame pun. It’s pretty much right out there. Essential oils. Okay. I’m talking about the highly aromatic oils that you can buy these days, made from cold pressing or steam distilling plants. All you ecological-minded folks out there should be aware that essential oils are very resource intensive. It takes a million rose petals to make just one ounce of rose oil. Personally I feel a little bit guilty just for being a meat eater these days, but at least now I can offset that guilt by knowing I don’t use essential oils. The way that some devotees do. Now they’re in almost everything it seems like. I personally have some lavender pillow freshening scent spray that I believe contains some essential oil and my husband actually just today we were looking for something that would work for teething pain and he couldn’t find any Ora-gel at the drugstore. All they had was this baby tooth gel with natural ingredients. Instant soothing formula. It’s registered as a dietary supplement. So all these red flags are going up, right? And it helps calm, relax and soothe infants that may be teething or upset. And the active ingredients are, of course, a proprietary blend of clove extract, chamomile extract and marigold extract.

0:37:32
BR: Essentially, it’s got essential oils in it. So just for our listeners who are not as astute as you are and perhaps who don’t spend their time on Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop page, what exactly are essential oils?

0:37:46
CW: Well, they smell pretty. They are, as I said, they are aromatic oils made from cold pressing or steam distilling plants. By the way, this little stuff that my husband brought home, we’re going to be returning it because I’m not putting essential oils on my baby’s gums. Apart from making your pillows and your furniture smell pretty, these oils lately have really scratched an itch in the wellness market and their appeal is really broad based. You can find, as you mentioned, you can find essential oils touted on Goop with Gwyneth Paltrow, but you can also find them on Alex Jones’ website. They are kind of for wealthy white women who like have way too much money and pay thousands of dollars to go on yoga retreats but they’re also purchased by weird randos who think that the government’s gonna collapse pretty soon and they need to take care of their own health care by rubbing essential oil on a gunshot wound…

BR:  Right or you know Obama’s gonna take the guns any minute now so make sure you have your essential oils in hand.

0:38:49
CW: Yes, and you can buy them through Gwyneth Paltrow or you can buy them for 20 bucks from a PTA mom or pick up an essential oils kit at Walmart. They’re sort of part craft project and part maverick frontier doctoring. You can put them on your skin, you can take them internally, you can add them to your food, you can make your house smell pretty, put them in a diffuser and put them in the air or even clean your countertops with them. They are truly supposed to be a miracle product.

0:39:19
BR: They’re truly “supposed to be”. I wish all packaging had that truly and then asterisk supposed to be.

CW: Now there’s no shortage of skeptical looks at essential oils. One of the earliest I found actually appeared in the Skeptical Inquirer back in 1996 by Lynn McCutcheon. It’s titled What’s That I Smell? The Claims of Aromatherapy. Unfortunately, that early article didn’t shut down the whole industry. It has since then actually quite boomed due to a couple of factors I’ll go into. Number one is essential oils just seem nice to people. They smell good. Rachel Monroe in a 2017 New Yorker article, How Essential Oils Became the Cure for Our Age of Anxiety, how essential oils became the cure for our age of anxiety, sums up their appeal this way, quote, oils are touted as something between a perfume and a potion, a substance that can keep you smelling nice while also providing physical and psychological benefits. They are often stacked on the same shelves as herbal remedies such as echinacea and St. John’s wort. The bottom line is they do smell nice, and that’s kind of their job. It’s hard to imagine something that smells so good doesn’t have some psychological or medical benefits or likewise it’s hard to imagine that it could have some detrimental effects. An opposite to consider is, have you heard of poop therapy?

BR: Not as such.

0:40:47
CW: Poop transplants, they sound, sounds really gross. Fecal transplants, it sounds gross, it involves something gross, I’m sure it doesn’t smell great but it can save the life of a person who has had their gut bacteria eradicated and needs to get that garden growing again. But the average person hears about this type of thing and says, eww gross, I’d rather die. Some, you know, they might be being hyperbolic but it makes you skin crawl to think about, you know, somebody’s poop and it smells gross.

0:41:17
BR: Well, it’s the same thing with leeches. I mean, leeches are actually used in some medical places because they’re really good at absorbing blood. And so it’s actually a real thing.

0:41:26
CW: But they’re gross. So people think, oh, that’s gross. Essential oils, on the other hand, are rose petals and flowers and herbs and chamomile. I mean, they’re all natural. We’re not talking about poop or leeches. We’re talking about pretty smelling little potions and they’re in these adorable little tiny bottles with names like Acceptance and Moon Mist and Dragon Time and they are easy. They’re easy to acquire. They’re easy to acquire and they make you feel self-sufficient when it comes to health care. Now access to a doctor is sometimes hard to come by. I get that. I could tell you dozens of annoying stories about this past time in my life when I was pregnant, just being on hold for hours with the insurance company, being told the wrong things by the doctor office or a lab or a billing specialist. And I consider myself a rather tenacious person. I work at home. I don’t have any other children. I had time to deal with all this crap. I can’t imagine being a harried working mom who just throws their hands up and says, well forget it, I can just buy some essential oils and hopefully that’ll help. Now, there’s companies that have capitalized on this. The two major companies dealing out essential oils these days are Young Living and doTERRA. They are both out of Utah and it is a billion dollar business nowadays. Essential oils are, they’re often held up as an example of an MLM marketing scheme.

0:42:53
BR: Multi-level, yes.

CW: Now, I can’t, you can’t call it a pyramid scheme because of course those are illegal, but there are plenty of things that sure look like pyramid schemes and they have that triangular shape and how the business model is set up.

0:43:06
BR: Did you ever see About Schmidt?

0:43:08
CW: I did not.

0:43:09
BR: There’s this great scene where Schmidt, played by Jack Nicholson is at a dinner table along with Kathy Bates and his daughter and Bates’s doofus son and there’s this great scene where where the doofus son is trying to trying to get Schmitt to invest in this. And he keeps trying to keep trying to get him to invest in this thing And this is great line where he says well now and it’s not a pyramid scheme. It’s clearly a pyramid scheme and Nicholson just sort of, he just smiles and anyway, I just had to throw it out.

0:43:49
CW: Well, yeah, the whole pyramid nature of essential oils distribution is, we’re actually, we have in works a whole episode that will be devoted to MLMs in general and more on that later. But I should note here that it can be a very dangerous thing to combine eager salespeople with no medical education, with a sales structure that resembles an MLM scheme where relationship-based sales are used. And we’re not talking about makeup or candles or leggings. We’re talking about an item that is rumored or sometimes outright claimed by people selling it to treat medical conditions. Some of these sales reps might be up to their elbows in product that they have kind of been forced to buy due to their contracts and they want to move this stuff and they are foisting it on people they know and unwittingly becoming snake oil salesmen in the process. Another popular thing that MLM structures do is the conventions that pump you up and make you want to sell the stuff and One writer attended the annual fulfill your destiny convention for distributors and she reported seeing Shirts with printed slogans like there’s an oil for that and I’m silently assessing your oil needs. Which is just creepy.

0:45:02
BR: I’m silently assessing you know all these do not call the police on me. I’m assessing…

CW:  They are essentially diagnosing people’s medical need for different oils to cure them of stuff that’s creepy but there’s also this feeling of they’re sharing wellness rather than selling a product. Low level distributors like I said mostly stay at home moms, they don’t really reap much profits from this. The thing that usually pulls somebody out of an MLM structure is the fact that, Oh well, I wasnít earning any money at it. But a lot of these essential oil distributors keep at it because, well, it’s not about the money, I’m helping people. I’m keeping people I care about healthy. So while the turnover in most pyramid schemes and MLMs is notoriously high, essential oil sales actually have a pretty stickier demographic. People who get into it more often stick with it.

0:46:00
BR: Interesting. Yeah, the altruism effect is very strong and we see this over and over again. You see the same thing with psychics, for example, where you and I have both met many psychics who they sincerely absolutely believe that they have psychic abilities and they’re sincerely trying to help clients and they get such this feedback and they get people crying and saying, Oh my God, thank you. You reassured me that everything is going to be okay and my mother is thereî and that’s very powerful and so the altruistic aspect is very powerful.

0:46:36
CW: It can be much more motivating than profits. So I took a quick look at the two companies, like I said Young Living and doTERRA and Gary Young, the founder of Young Living who just passed away this past year after some strokes, which I guess essential oils did not prevent. He was a character, kind of a, pictured himself almost like a Richard Branson of Alt-Med. He has a really bizarre origin story. According to the self-published biography, which his wife wrote, he was in a coma after a logging accident, fractured his skull and spinal cord, and he ended up curing himself by drinking lemon water for like the better part of a year. And regardless of how true that is, he got motivated at an early age to go full tilt into alt-med stuff. He opened clinics that ended up getting shut down because he was arrested for practicing medicine without a license. Ended up opening clinics in like Ecuador and Tijuana, he began taking blood samples, claiming that he had a simple blood test to find cancer. A reporter from the LA Times submitted a sample and was told he had aggressive cancer and should immediately begin an expensive detox at the clinic. It turns out the blood that he had submitted was from a cat, a perfectly healthy tabby cat. Gary Young got into essential oils back in the 90s. He immediately bought 160 acres of farmland in Idaho to start growing the lavender, peppermint and tansy that’s used to make the oils. He’s there’s been a lot a lot of weird stuff happening with him. His infant daughter died in a whirlpool bath. They essentially did a home birth in a whirlpool bath where he was the only quote unquote medical person attending this this birth. And while he was not prosecuted for the for the death of his daughter, the experts did say that had she been birthed in the normal way and not been underwater for the better part of an hour, she would have survived. He has, however, pled guilty to a number of other things involving practicing medicine without a license. He’s got he’s got employees saying that he was doing gallbladder surgery on people in South America. There’s there’s all sorts of very strange things that have happened. His only credential was a Ph.D. in naturopathy from an unaccredited school. And I mean, is there really an accredited school out there that offers a degree in naturopathy? I don’t know.

0:49:12
BR: No, no, that’s he may have filled out some paperwork at some point. It may not have been proofread. Good for him, I guess.

CW: So, anyway, so I took a look at doTERRA thinking maybe doTERRA is a totally different, you know, different type of company from from Young Living and well, they’re also out of Utah and they were formed as an offshoot by a bunch of ex-young living executives. So it’s the same people just once removed. Their goal was to take essential oils out of the fringe alt-med community and get them into the hands of moms, which they have done very successfully. And probably in the long run, that might actually be more harmful than using your naturopathy degree to do gallbladder surgery on some guy in Ecuador.

0:50:03
BR: Yeah, I can see that.

0:50:05
CW: The chief medical officer for Dutera is David Hill, an avuncular chiropractor. I tried to find out what that meant. His website just says they practice very gentle chiropractic.

0:50:21
BR: I’m guessing he just sort of flipped through the dictionary and the A’s and he just is like, hey, I’m avuncular. That’s what I am.

0:50:28
CW: He claims that there are literally thousands of studies that demonstrate the benefits of essential oils. Spoiler alert, there really aren’t. Anyway, like I said, both of the companies are based in Utah and doTERRA especially is connected, is really connected to the Mormon Church, which provides a ready-made network of stay-at-home moms. Well, who have a do-it-yourself attitude. Did you know that Utah has the highest number of MLM schemes out of all the states?

BR:  I did not know that.

CW: Did I say MLM schemes? I meant distribution-based businesses.

0:51:04
BR: Oh, right. Do they include snake effluvium?

0:51:10
CW: I think so. I’m pretty sure you can find that in Utah. Yes, so essential oils pretty much have one foot in the alt-med camp and another foot in the religious camp, two things that Utah is pretty big on. From an October 2017 New Yorker article by Rachel Monroe, How Essential Oils Became the Cure for Our Age of Anxiety, for many consumers, essential oils represent a purer and more ancient form of medicine, one with biblical overtones, all those scriptural references to anointing and none of the baggage of the contemporary health care system. So you see there’s even this like biblical pull to find a way to cure something with oils, like was done in the old biblical times.

0:51:54
BR: I miss the old days of the humor. I always found the theory of humors to be especially useful.

0:52:03
CW: A writer David Stewart, who published a book titled The Chemistry of Essential Oils, made simple, God’s love manifest in molecules, claims that the oils have divine intelligence. And that’s almost reminiscent to me of how homeopaths claim that water has memory.

0:52:19
BR: Right, or Emoto’s water. Did we ever do a show on Emoto’s water? We need to do a show on that.

0:52:27
CW: Okay, anyway, both of these companies, who by the way, they have become rivals and have sued each other. Actually, Young sued Duterra for stealing trade secrets and a jury dismissed all the charges. But during the trial, the judge complained that all the aromatherapy in the room was giving him a headache and a stomachache.

0:52:48
BR: The bogus arguments were that was fine it was…

0:52:51
CW: Just the courtroom was so darn smelly Now these companies skirt the FDA by making veiled references to health benefits touting vitality and balance and buzzwords that are Medically meaningless and therefore you can’t really test for them. I bet there’s some quantum in there probably I didn’t come across it, but claiming that the oils will help with mundane problems that aren’t quite diseases, like you’ll sleep better, you’ll be able to focus more, you’ll have more energy, you’ll be clear-headed. And I’m grabbing this, I have in my hand right now the tooth gel that has essential oils in it, helps calm, relax, and soothe infants that may be teething, upset, or restless. You notice it does not say, it does not say relieves pain because you can measure that right now we wouldn’t want to have anything quantified and it says right here dietary supplement so it is not medicine FDA cannot regulate this Rachel Monroe in the New Yorker again mentions that all the independent distributors aren’t really as careful as the extremely well lawyered up companies doTerra or Young Living. Quote, it’s much harder to police the millions of independent distributors. In September 2014, the FDA sent a sternly worded letter to doTERRA, scolding the company for distributors claims about oils and conditions including cancer, brain injury, autism, Alzheimer’s disease and ADHD. The agency cited a tweet by a doTERRA consultant using the handle Mrs. Skinny Medic that listed, quote, oils that could help prevent your contracting the Ebola virus. And a Pinterest post by Wellness Empress that recommended peppermint oil for asthma, autism, bacterial infections and brain injury. Is there any part of this that doesn’t sound sketchy?

0:54:42
BR: I’m just wondering, because so far the the I can barely see the microphone for all the red flags.

0:54:50
CW: There’s tons of red flags with essential oils. More importantly, letís look at some actual medical opinions and whether or not oils are in some cases harmful. Stephen Novella and Harriet Hall have both covered essential oils over at Science Based Medicine. Novella says that the popularity is, It represents a fundamental failure of medical education. In an essay criticizing an ambulance company using essential oils as a substitute for narcotic painkillers, he says that using a fake treatment is no way to combat the real issue of narcotics overuse. Quote, it seems like the allure of doing something novel and natural is distracting from real medicine. And he goes on to describe how essential oils, like other pseudoscience that came before them, they’re just exploiting the weak points in the medical system. I quote, especially when dealing with a treatment for a subjective symptom like pain, one that we know to be highly modifiable by nonspecific interventions, like distraction, mood, the introduction of a novel treatment, physical contact, the environment, interaction with the practitioner, and other variables, adequate controls are essential pun intended. You may be shocked to learn that such high quality studies are almost completely lacking in the published literature regarding essential oils. Unquote. So, yeah, the studies are often poorly designed. And of course, the layperson won’t spot that, nor will the distributor who’s being handed nice, fancy brochures from Dutera or or Young Living that tout these benefits that are quote clinically proven when they’re not really clinically proven. There’s some indications in some really badly designed studies and there’s a whole lot of anecdotal evidence. And the way that the essential oils are delivered is often mixed with some other therapeutic thing like massage or hot baths. So the effect that people notice is likely due to do in part or in whole to that manner of delivery and to quote The skeptical inquirers Lynn McCutcheon in her in her 1996 article quote jasmine oil massaged into the abdomen and groin Promotes sexual stimulation. I’ll bet it does with it with or without the jasmine unquote And yeah, anyway, and there there’s again what you see with a lot of pseudoscience there’s in vitro studies showing that it does something in a petri dish which okay that’s a little interesting but it’s a world away from actually having a clinical effect in the human body as I think there’s an XKCD comic that shows yeah yeah there’s a lot of things that kill cancer in the petri dish but bear in mind so does a handgun. There’s a guy pointing a gun at a petri dish because, yeah, that will kill cancer in vitro. Dr. Novella goes over a bunch of reviews of the best evidence. The Cochrane Review sums it up by just stating that more and better quality research is needed. Nothing has passed the threshold necessary to say that essential oils have any positive effect on pain or other ailments. Now a few of the ways that essential oils can be dangerous beyond just the baseline danger of choosing something like that over unnecessary medical treatment that somebody needs people with asthma should be careful. Kids with asthma especially. As pediatrician Chad Hayes warns asthma can also be triggered by volatile organic compounds one example of which would be essential oils. Advising parents to treat asthma by diffusing essential oils is dangerous and irresponsible, and it demonstrates a tremendous lack of understanding about the disease. The Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America has information on its website cautioning that there is no evidence that essential oils help asthma symptoms. And, in fact, essential oils can trigger asthma attacks. They are not regulated by the FDA. They can irritate the skin and they can be poisonous if ingested by young children, which is why I’m not putting this damn tooth gel on my kids gums. Anyway, like anything else out there, people can have allergic reactions to the oils and some people can have very severe toxic reactions to the oils. There is a patient named Stacy Haluka, which her case is mentioned on WebMD. When the oil salesperson she was buying this stuff from dismissed her initial rash, just saying, well, it’s a byproduct of the detoxing your body is going through, Haluka continued using the oils. And eventually, she ended up in the ER with oozing blisters, welts along her back and abdomen and swollen eyes. Others have had reactions similar to chemical burns. And so yeah, before you put a bunch of this in your bathtub, test it out on your skin at least, okay? If you like the way it smells, that’s fine. Just make sure you’re not allergic to it. Pets, really, really don’t ever give your pets essential oils. Pets have been harmed by a lot of well-meaning owners who want to treat their dog’s skin condition or a tick or something with essential oils. Many of these oils are highly toxic to dogs and cats. Cats lack an enzyme to break down the concentrated oils, so even a little bit can harm them really quickly. So if you like the oils because they smell pretty, what I would recommend is don’t fall for poorly designed studies that say they’re medicinal, because so far it sure looks like they aren’t. Don’t ever put them on an infant or small child and keep them away from anybody with asthma or allergies. Never ever feed them to pets or put them on your pet skin and for God’s sake, don’t become a sales rep.

BR: Good advice for our listeners who probably don’t need it.

CW: And I should probably say, I should have said this at the beginning of this whole episode, Ben and I are not doctors. We are not giving you medical advice but see the people pushing these oils aren’t doctors either. So bear that in mind, and we’re giving you consumer caution more than medical advice.

1:00:57
BR: Exactly, exactly. Some skeptical commentary on everything from snake squeezins to witch ointments to essential oils.

1:01:06
CW: Snake squeezins, I might put that in the title, I like that.

1:01:09
BR: Go for it. I’m gonna talk briefly about Lorenzo’s oil.

1:01:13
CW: Okay, Lorenzo’s oil.

1:01:14
BR: Do you remember the story behind that? Anything about it?

1:01:16
CW: I remember it was a sad movie at some point in the 80s or 90s.

1:01:23
BR: Both. It was a sad movie and it was in the 90s. The film came out in 1992. It starred Nick Nolte and Susan Sarandon. And it was actually done by one of my favorite directors, George Miller, who did The Road Warrior, which is one of the all-time best film plays. But the film itself was about, it was one of those based on a true story, and again, we’ve talked about this before, even when the subject isn’t a horror film or The Exorcist or demonic possession, always take based on a true story follows somewhat. It was about a boy named Lorenzo O’Donoghue, who was the son of Italian economist Augusto, who was diagnosed at age five with a genetic disease. It has a long, complicated one that I can’t pronounce, so I’ll just call it XALD, which is what everyone else calls it as well.

1:02:21
CW: Okay.

1:02:22
BR: So it’s a neurological symptom disease, and it’s progressive, and as I mentioned most kids don’t reach their teens who have this. So it was a very sad case and Lorenzo started to develop the symptoms and his father said we got to do something about it and the medical community said there’s not really much we can do and so he didn’t buy it and so he started trying to research, did everything you could. And the film, as with any films of its ilk, you need to have, of course, a story arc.

1:02:55
You need to have contrast. You need a hero and a villain. Unfortunately, in the film, the villain was off in the medical community.

1:03:03
CW: Ooh, Big Pharma.

1:03:05
BR: Big Pharma, right. So you had the setup of the maverick parents who were doing the best for their kid in the face of an uncaring and dismissive medical establishment. And that was one of the themes and again, that’s pretty common for films of this nature.

1:03:22
CW: Unfortunately, it’s pretty common for a lot of medical, so-called medical documentaries these days too.

1:03:28
BR: Yes, that’s true. The true story is a bit more comforting. As it happens, the parents of this boy met with doctors and he asked the world experts to help him understand what was going on. So this was not some maverick shoe salesman who had some wacky idea. His idea was based on the medical evidence at the time.

1:03:54
CW: Okay, so Big Pharma in the real life story, Big Pharma wasn’t so much an enemy as a supplemental character.

1:04:05
BR: Yeah.

1:04:05
CW: Yeah. Yeah.

1:04:06
BR: So again, the film makes it as more of a good guy, bad guy, but in real life, there was much more of a collaborative effort. But again, you’re trying to make a story, so there you go with it. So it’s a complicated story, and I’m just going to summarize it quickly. For people who are interested, you can read Steve Novella’s excellent analysis on the blog Science Based Medicine, which I think you mentioned earlier that Harriet Holland and many others contribute to. So Lorenzo actually ended up living to 30. So he greatly outlived most kids who have his diagnosis.

1:04:42
CW: Yeah, that sounds like he doubled his projected lifespan there.

1:04:46
BR: Even more so.

CW: Wow.

BR: But what happened was that when the film came out, other parents of kids with XALD, they got this notion from the film, Lorenzo’s Oil, that it was sort of a miracle cure, that it was going to be able to treat their kids. Unfortunately, that wasn’t quite how it turned out. So as it happens, the best evidence we have of the efficacy of Lorenzo’s Oil found that it was of no benefit to people with symptomatic XALD.

1:05:16
CW: Oh, so once you develop symptoms, your prognosis goes down and the oil is not helpful.

1:05:24
Well basically the situation is, so here it’s sort of a weird story. So the oil that Lorenzo’s parents developed is a real thing, it’s an oil including various naturally occurring oils. So what happens is that if it’s given to people who are asymptomatic with a particular gene, their chances of going on to become symptomatic are significantly reduced. So it does have an effect. It’s not snake oil. I mean, there is a legitimate actual effect. The curious thing is that Lorenzo was symptomatic. And so the oil that was named for him and developed on his behalf probably didn’t actually help him.

1:06:11
CW: Oh, so, yeah, for further trials and clinical studies indicated that the oil is primarily helpful for asymptomatic individuals, but Lorenzo himself was already symptomatic?

1:06:24
BR: Yes.

1:06:25
CW: So, here we have a case where a snake oil or Lorenzo’s oil, it does work, but the case that it originally was touted to work for, it might not have done anything for that young man?

1:06:38
BR: Right. And so, you know, and Novella talks about this again in the blog I mentioned. He basically says that one of the issues here is it’s anecdotal evidence. We have a sample size of one, in this case, Lorenzo Odone, and the oil, just to be clear, it didn’t reverse his neurological problems, but it seemed to slow his progression. So it’s not as if the oil miraculously reversed anything. It just seemed to make it progress even more slowly than it would likely have with somebody else. But again, keep in mind that we have no control. We don’t have a twin of Lorenzo who had the same thing who didn’t get the oil. So it’s interesting, but essentially it’s an anecdote.

1:07:23
CW: So it may have done something for him or he might just be an outlier that happened to live a lot longer than the average person with this condition.

1:07:31
BR: Exactly. And so Lorenzo’s oil is currently, it is recommended for preventive therapy with asymptomatic boys with XALD.

1:07:42
CW: So, that’s great that this particular oil rather than reinforcing the notion that the medical industry doesn’t want you to know about XYZ, the medical industry has embraced it and is offering it as a treatment to those it has been clinically proven to help, correct?

1:08:01
BR: Right. That’s right.

1:08:03
CW: That’s a happy ending.

1:08:04
BR: That is a happy ending. And just to sort of circle back to the film, Lorenzo’s Oil. I mean, that came out in 1992. I understand why they structured the film that way. But it unfortunately, as I mentioned, it sort of reinforces this notion of the populist narrative of, you know, the the maverick going out there and fighting the establishment. And this is exactly the sort of sentiment that people like Dr. Stanislav Brzezinski have exploited. And I think we’ve mentioned him on the show before. Robert Blazkowicz has done a lot of stuff on him. He’s been talked about in Skeptical Inquirer magazine and elsewhere. Brzezinski first came to National Literariety on the Sally Jesser Raphael show. Now you may be wondering, oh, do you mean the published peer-reviewed journal, Sally and Jessa Raphael? I do not. I mean the talk show that mentioned the profiled miracle stories and miracle cures of Dr. Brzezinski. And unfortunately, again, maybe we’ll do a whole show on that at some point, but unfortunately Brzezinski’s methods have not been proven to work. He’s a Texas doctor and there’s ongoing issues with him anyway. My only point here is that unfortunately many of these themes that we see in Lorenzo’s oil of the maverick parents who are just fighting against medical establishment Big Pharma, it can be easily folded into this conspiracy theory and people accepting alternative medicines when in fact there’s no evidence that they work at all.

1:09:36
CW: Yeah, I think Tim Minchin said alternative medicine that’s been proven to work is called medicine.

1:09:42
BR: It is. hat’s what they call that.

1:09:44
CW: Yeah. And I don’t know if I could stomach an entire episode about Dr. Brzezinski. He makes my stomach turn and I get very, very angry seeing the families, the desperate families of children with brain cancer who have sold everything they own and started public GoFundMe’s to get the $100,000 they need to have Dr. Brzezinski just essentially inject their children with a compound found in urine.

1:10:09
BR: Yes, well again, maybe we’ll do a show on that and maybe we won’t, but certainly people need to be aware of that. But there are other different types of oils, some of which are used recreationally, right?

1:10:24
CW: Yeah, yeah, moving, taking a much lighter tack, a higher tack, you might say. We’re going to talk a little bit about, we’re going to end by talking about CBD oil, or cannabidiol is how it’s pronounced. The whole name for it is cannabidiol, and it’s made from hemp, and it lacks the THC component that in marijuana makes people high. The plants for years were bred to get higher amounts of THC or tetrahydrocannabidiol, but this new goldmine, and it is a goldmine right now, is causing a lot of plant breeders to go ahead and breed plants that have a high CBD content instead. Now, THC and CBD are described as chemical cousins, with hemp plants producing varying degrees of both compounds. CBD, it wasn’t always seen as a goldmine. As I mentioned, it’s not the thing in pot that gets you high. It was once known as, quote, the hippie’s disappointment. An organic chemist named Roger Adams isolated cannabidiol in the 1930s and 1940s. He filed for a patent and thought it might have some uses. And during the following years, marijuana growers experimented with raising plants that had high levels of CBD, hoping for a really unique great high, but they didn’t get one. So that kind of seemed like a dead end.

BR: Did they get their money back or file a class action lawsuit against the dealers or how did that work?

CW: No, I think they just, the hippies were disappointed.

BR: Okay.

CW: Yes, hence the term. But now there’s a resurgence of interest in all things CBD might be able to do. Emphasis on might. Marijuana already occupies this really unique niche among the yoga-loving, modern medical marijuana hippie types. And many of them say that hemp is a miracle plant that can do anything, and CBD seems to fulfill that prophecy for these folks. And it certainly is a godsend for people in the industry. The Hemp Business Journal estimates that the CBD market was worth $190 million this past year and this is an industry that didn’t really even exist five years ago. Some optimistic reports even estimate that over the next few years it could climb as high as $22 billion. From Washington Post columnist Lavenia Romanathon writing in May of last year, quote, for generation anxious, affixed to its phones and stricken by news alerts, overworked and under rested, the mysterious substance known as CBD is quickly becoming the new it drug. The New York Times recently quoted ad executive and CBD proponent Jason Deland saying, quote, CBD is the chemical equivalent to Bitcoin in 2016. It’s hot everywhere and yet almost nobody understands it. Now, but as has happened with so many other promising new drugs or popular herbs, the CBD phenomenon quickly has reached epic panacea type proportions. Ramanthan continues, quote, last year the FDA dinged a number of companies hawking CBD based on unsubstantiated claims, mainly that it could cure or reverse cancer. Yes, of course, a big buzz around CBD oil being a miracle cure for everything includes people claiming it can cure heart disease, stress, seizures, cancers of all types, diabetes, back and knee pain, alcoholism, wrinkles, and other signs of aging, depression, sleep problems, PTSD, multiple sclerosis, inflammation, acne, and use it on your pets too for whatever ails them. Do you want me to go on here? There’s like so much.

1:14:12
BR: What about gout? I want to know if it does gout.

1:14:15
CW: I’m pretty sure that somebody somewhere claims it’s good for gout too. The main thing to remember here is it’s really early in CBD research. Preliminary studies and anecdotes are running rampant. It’s been described as the Wild West period for CBD. Everything right now is unclear and unregulated and untested. David Gorski, oncologist and notable skeptic, has written numerous takedowns of the buzz over phony or unproven cancer cures. And this includes Rick Simpson’s hemp oil regimen, the cancer cure they don’t want you to know about.

1:14:53
BR: One of many.

1:14:54
CW: Yeah, the Rick Simpson oil or Phoenix Tears is a whole different oil from CBD. The Rick Simpson oil has a high, really potent amount of THC in it. And as for the CBD oil, which does not get you high, Gorski does state that some cannabinoids show modest anti-tumor activity in vitro, but we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves. Remember the whole XKCD comic of somebody pointing a handgun at a petri dish? Just because something kills cancer cells in a petri dish does not mean it’ll work clinically. We shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves. And anyway, Gorski discusses several anecdotal cases. If you want to Google those on science-based medicine, there are quite a few. Now reputable scientists and studies have shown promise in the area of seizures. That is the one the one solid bit of medical stuff I could find is the Food and Drug Administration has approved one drug containing CBD. It’s called Epidolix, and it is for previously uncontrollable pediatric seizures. Now, in vitro and animal studies do show promise for a handful of other things, but we have to wait it out and see what happens. The main thing that I see CBD oil marketed for, and believe me, in Vegas it’s everywhere, but you don’t even have to be in a state that has legalized marijuana. You can order this stuff just about anywhere, because since it has no THC in it, it can be shipped anywhere in the U.S. and not break any federal laws. The main thing I see it marketed for out here is pain and mood conditions like anxiety. And those things can be highly susceptible to placebo effect since they are symptoms that are pretty much in your brain and controlled by your brain. Nobody is really putting CBD oil on wounds to staunch the bleeding or trying to regrow amputated limbs with it.

1:16:52
BR: Or trying to fly?

1:16:54
CW: Yes.

1:16:55
BR: Or go meet up with Satan in the woods and kiss his behind?

1:16:57
CW: Yes, that would be another thing you could measure. You could see if somebody was actually flying, but nobody is using it for things like that. People do swear that it makes them feel less anxious and it helps them sleep at night though. So it’s important to remember that the doctors and researchers who know the most about CBD oil right now, caution that we don’t really know all that much about it. Steven Petro, just last month in the Washington Post, spoke to Dr. Donald Abrams, who is an oncologist who was part of the National Academy of Sciences Committee that issued the most comprehensive to date report on cannabis and cannabinoid benefits. And Petro summarizes, quote, several studies have found CBD to be harmless, which is to say safe, but that’s very different from proving its effectiveness. Abrams told me there have only been five randomized clinical trials that have looked at CBD until the Epidolic Studies. The largest of these studies was a 24-person trial. Yep, that’s small.” So right now the hype of CBD oil’s myriad miracle properties is kind of floating on a raft of anecdotes and the hip factor. This oil is dispensed in cozy little shops and stores offering the oil infused into adorable little gummy bears. You can get it in ice cream, in flavored tinctures that you can go make cocktails with, and you can even buy a CBD bath bomb and soak your pain away. Willie Nelson right now has come out with a line of coffee beans infused with CBD oil. So there’s definitely a hip and with it and I’m using the in thing sort of fad effect going on here. Now, all these little things you can buy are supposed to contain a particular amount of CBD oil. Another thing about this particular Wild West period of unregulated CBD is that there’s really no guarantee that what you’re buying is what you think you’re buying. Despite what products are labeled, there has been a big difference in the amount of CBD actually present. And there’s also a risk of contaminants being present, especially in hemp that comes from China or Eastern Europe. A 2017 study from the University of Pennsylvania found that about 70% of the CBD products they tested were mislabeled. Some had more CBD than was advertised, some had significantly less, so you were paying for nothing, and some contained THC even though they weren’t supposed to.

1:19:27
BR: So you talked about the sort of wild west aspect. So what is, is there an established dosage?

1:19:33
CW: That’s another good point. That’s a good question. Since as of now it’s unregulated, any recommended servings that you see on packages are just random guesses by the manufacturers. The FDA won’t let CBD oil be labeled with any sort of recommended safe dosage amount because it hasn’t been studied enough to come up with that information.

1:19:56
BR: And of course it may vary greatly between individuals anyway.

1:19:59
CW: Exactly, yeah. The best advice I could find, and this is not my advice, this is advice I have found online, is just don’t believe the hype that it’s going to cure everything. Don’t give it to somebody with cancer and tell them it’s going to cure their cancer. And definitely tell your doctor or your psychopharmacologist if you’re adding CBD oil to your particular wellness regime. There are some contraindications with a few medications, which isn’t to say that all the medications out there have been tested and studied in relationship to CBD oil, because they haven’t. There’s a lot of big question marks out there. Just of the medications that have been researched, doctors have found that warfarin, oxycodone, and codeine, to name a few, are drugs that should not be paired with CBD oil. So definitely mention to your doctor, if you’re on any medications you want to make sure that taking CBD oil won’t interfere with them. Time’s gonna tell. I’m honestly kind of on the fence about it because the data seems to be on the fence too. So we aren’t seeing any people die from overdoses on these gummy worms and I haven’t tried it but I personally would probably be okay with noshing on a low dose CBD infused gummy and see what happens. Plenty of people I know enjoy them and there’s a lot of hype, there’s vast amounts of money being made and that money at least will help fuel the further studies. We do have one FDA approved drug already as I said for the pediatric seizures, so all I can say is just got to wait and see and just be aware that it’s still the wild west.

1:21:37
BR: Fair enough.

(MUSIC)

BR: All right, well, thanks for joining us for our episode on miracle elixirs and potions and other ointments and things like that.

CW: Yeah, like many other topics, I was overwhelmed by the amount of stuff you can take notes on about Miracle Oils available today from your local neighbor mom or on the shelves of a drugstore or just about anywhere. There’s still a lot of snake effluvia out there that wants your money.

1:22:20
BR: Well put. So next week, we will have a special guest on a special guest yes Erik Kristopher Myers a friend of the podcast and filmmaker And we’ll be having him on to talk about The Warrens and by the Warrens we were referring to Ed and Lorraine Warren the head in the rain Yes, the the ghost hunter II Exploitation II people behind or somewhat behind or worked their way into various notable stories, including the Amityville Horror and the Conjuring films. And so that’ll be a fun show.

1:23:02
CW: Yeah, we had a lot to talk to Erik about. And Erik is a special guest in terms of he’s the specialist, most special-y person we know for topics like this. He’s done a lot of in-depth research into Ed and Lorraine Warren, and I’m looking forward to being able to present what he brought to us.

1:23:22
BR: And of course, you know, just being a film buff himself is great. I mean, you know, he and I are both film buffs, as you are as well, and Pascual, but he brings a certain angle into it that’s really useful.

1:23:37
CW: And to let listeners know, it will actually end up in two parts, our coverage of Ed and Lorraine Warren, because there’s a lot. There’s a whole lot of stuff that they’ve had their, their, their, their,

1:23:49
BR: There’s a lot of things that they’ve dipped their little fingers into.

1:23:52
CW: Yes, yes, yes. They’re kind of patient zero for a lot of horror film tropes and even ghost story tropes. And it’s fascinating to sort of trace that back to the origins.

1:24:02
BR: Yeah, so we’ll be talking about the movies, and in some cases, the true stories behind famous films, including the Amityville Horror, and the Conjuring films, the Enfield Poltergeist case, the Smurls, the Demon Murder case, and all sorts of cool stuff. So be sure to tune in then.

1:24:21
CW: Until then, everybody, stay strange.

1:24:22
BR: Bye-bye.

1:24:23
CW: Take care.

1:24:24
We would like to thank our sponsor level patrons, Amy Freshour-Kelly and Dr. Angela Mattke. If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor or just throwing us a buck or two per episode, check out patreon.com forward slash squaring the strange. Every bit helps us keep the lights on here in strange studios and we could not keep bringing you content without the support of our generous friends. If you’re looking to provide moral support, head on over to iTunes and give us a five-star review. Every positive review helps us move up the podcast charts. Thanks again,

1:24:59
strangers.

1:25:02
Squaring the Strange is a production of Two Heads Studio LLC, copyright 2018. Theme music by Shriekback, additional music by Memory, Keytard and Feathered, and Pasual Romero. Additional support provided by Ashley Romero, Robert Stundine, and of course our listeners and patrons. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of Squaring the Strange and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Two Heads Studio, Kronos Creative, Center for Inquiry, our advertisers, or any affiliated Heads Studio, Kronos Creative, Center for Inquiry, our advertisers, or any affiliated organizations and employers.

Transcribed with Cockatoo