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Are We All Quacks?Doctors allow one to die The Charlatans kill Jean de la Bruère
Edzard Ernst, MD, PhD
Arch Fam Med. 1997;6(4):389-390.
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FEW TERMS in medicine are as insulting as quack or charlatan. They imply a sinister, evil, uninformed practice encountered, so, we hope, only in the Dark Ages of medicine.1 But how sure can we be that quackery belongs to the past? What is a quack anyway?
There is no single quality to characterize the term. Dictionaries are also not very helpful: "unskilled practiser of medicine,"2 "ignorant or dishonest practitioner."3 W. T. Jarvis4 of the US National Council Against Health Fraud defines a quack as someone who "promotes therapies known to be false" and who "profits from doing this."
Intriguingly, this definition might put many physicians close to the ranks of quacks. In medicine, we have to deal the best we can with uncertainty to reassure patients. About 15% of our clinical practice is still scientifically unproved.5,6 Clinical medicine seems to consist of a
. . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]
Author Affiliations
Exeter, England
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