won a George Polk Award, and been voted Journalist of the Year by the Maine Press association, among numerous other honors. He is the author of A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear, and his writing has appeared in Foreign Policy, USA Today, Popular Science, Atavist Magazine, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the Associated Press, and elsewhere. He lives in Vermont.
Hongoltz-Hetling applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, If It Sounds Like a Quack...: A Journey to the Fringes of American Medicine, and reported the following:
In my case, Page 99 opens with a description of the Food and Drug Administration in the early aughts, grappling with an explosion of fraudulent pills, pseudomedical practices and quacky devices that are endangering the health (and pocketbook) of the American public. The proliferation of such frauds has so overwhelmed the FDA that the agency is "like a fierce old tomcat drowning in a sea of mice." I note that the FDA and other federal agencies were motivated to retool their campaigns against these medical scofflaws. Then, after a section break, I take the pulse of a different American interest group in the early 2000s: The anti-vaccine crowd. These folks, I say, are facing the robust success of a series of vaccination campaigns over the previous half century: "polio, smallpox, diptheria, tetanus, pertussis, all wiped out by successful public vaccination campaigns." And in the early 2000s, vaccine promoters had something new to crow about: the virtual eradication of measles in the United States.Visit Matt Hongoltz-Hetling's website.
"It was enough to make an antivaxxer feel very blergh."
My page 99 really is an unusually important one, opening as it does a critical point in my larger narrative about fraudulent medicine. It also gives a good window into a staple of my writing style, which sometimes trends into what I think of as the "lightheartedly snarky" end of the spectrum.
The people who are giving the FDA the fits each believe they have developed "One True Cure" to serious diseases like juvenile diabetes and cancer. One man believed you could cure such things with lasers; another thought you could cure them with injections of baking soda, and a third believed you could drive the cancer from your body by drinking a diluted form of bleach.
And so, the early 2000s, as page 99 describes, was a pivotal time for these fringe healers, who were able to use the power of the Internet to herd up for mutual gain, and also to reach out directly to consumers. In all those senses, the Page 99 Test works very well here.
But of course, a page doth not a book make, and so I do see how the Page 99 Test could also leave a reader with some misconceptions. First of all, this page happens to be providing political context, but the bulk of the book is focused on the personal experiences of various fringe alternative healers. And while it showcases my snark, my writing style is very immersive in some sections, and very compassionate in others.
And of course, page 99 fails to mention a critical ingredient of the fringe alternative health paradigm — zombies.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
