rheumatoid arthritis, bursitis, and other similar conditions. Snake oil is still used as pain reliever in China: higher in inflammation-reducing EPA eicosapentaenic acid than any other known source, snake oil was an excellent and safe remedy for joint pain. Snake oil is still today sold in traditional Chinese pharmacy stores.

Chinese labourers on railroad gangs involved in building the Transcontinental Railroad to link North America coast to coast gave it to Europeans with joint pain. When rubbed on the skin above the pain, snake oil brought relief, or so it was claimed. This claim was ridiculed by other rival medicine salesmen, especially those selling patent medicines.

In time, snake oil became a generic name for the many medicines that were marketed as a panacea or miraculous remedy, whose ingredients were usually secret, unidentified, or mis-characterized, and mostly inert or ineffective. At best the placebo effect might provide some relief for whatever the problem might have been. Since EPA was unknown in the 19th century, and various medicine salesmen or manufacturers seldom had enough skills in analytical chemisty to analyze the contents and really find out what made snake oil the "miracle" medicine it was claimed to be, snake oil became the archetype of hoax. Likewise, American snake fats do not have as high EPA contents as the Chinese water snake fat does, and the American snake oils are likely to have been far less efficient pain relievers than the original Chinese snake oil, furthermore promoting the "hoax" archetyping.

The snake oil peddler became a stock character in Western movies: a travelling "doctor" with dubious credentials, selling some medicine — such as snake oil — with boisterous marketing hype, often supported by pseudo-scientific evidence. To enhance sales, 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. This practice is also called "grifting" and its practitioners "grifters".

W. C. Fields portrayed a Western frontier American snake oil salesman in Poppy (1936), complete with crowd accomplice; his (transparently fraudulent -- to the movie audience) demonstration of a miraculous cure for hoarseness from the back of a buckboard ignited a purchasing frenzy. 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 still occurs today, albeit with some updated marketing techniques. Cures for chronic diseases (eg, diabetes mellitus) for which there are only symptomatic treatments available from 'mainline' medicine, are especially common. The term snake oil peddling is used as a derogotary term to describe such practices.

An alternate theory for the origins of the term "snake oil" is that it was a corruption of "Seneca oil", after the Seneca tribe in the Eastern United States, who were known to use petroleum from natural seeps as a liniment for skin ailments. Native Americans are known to have used rattlesnake fat for various purposes.

The composition of snake oil medicines can vary markedly between products.

Snake oil sold in San Francisco's Chinatown in 1989 was found to contain:

• 75% unidentified carrier material, including camphor
• 25% oil from Chinese water snakes, itself consisting
  • 20% eicosapentaenic acid (EPA) - an omega 3 derivative
  • 48% myristic acid (14:0)
  • 10% stearic acid (18:0)
  • 14% oleic acid (18:1ω9)
  • 7% linoleic acid (18:2ω6) plus arachidonic acid (20:4ω6)

Chinese water snake is the richest known source of EPA. EPA is the starting material the body uses to make the series 3 prostaglandins. These prostaglandins are the biochemical messengers that induce and regulate inflamation. Like essential fatty acids, EPA can be absorbed through the skin. Salmon Oil, the next best source contains 18% EPA. Rattlesnake oil contains 8.5% EPA.

(Note that this makes the above similar in composition to modern-day capsaicin-based liniments. Thus, the original snake oil may have worked rather well as intended, even if it did not contain its alleged ingredients.)

Snake Oil Vindicated?

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Given to Dr. Richard Kunin's 1989 analysis //www.pubmedcentral.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1026931, it appears the Chinese snake oil made from Chinese water snakes (Enhydris chinensis) is very high on eicosapentaenic acid. This substance is known to be a pain reliever, and the Chinese snake oil products may contain up to 4% of it. Snake oil does not have the reputation of hoax in China it has in US and elsewhere in the western world, and it is used widely in traditional Chinese medicine. However, it neither has the image of a panacea either in China, but has one single use: reliever of joint and arthritic pain.

On purely pharmacochemical point of view, it is likely the genuine Chinese snake oil works fairly well in the purpose it is intended. On the other hand, the American products made from rattlesnake fats, which barely have the 1/3th of the EPA contents of Enhydris chinensis fat, are fairly likely to have been inferior or even useless. Since the 19th century snake oil peddlers and apothecarians seldom had any theoretical knowledge in chemistry or pharmacology, it is very likely they never understood the mechanism of effect of the Chinese product and what was its functional substance, but instead of analyzing it they tried to imitate it, with failing results. Because of those inferior or even fraudulent products, snake oil got the reputation of fraud it has today.

External links

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• Snake Oil History by CSICOP.
• The Snake Oil FAQ by Matt Curtin and others; pertaining to cryptographic snake oil.
• QuackWatch — One of several good websites devoted to analysing the fraudulent claims of the many forms of complementary or alternative medicine. This is a well-researched and well-maintained site containing lots of useful information and links.

References

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• A discussion of the use of snake oil appears in "Fats that heal: Fats that Kill" by Udo Erasmus 1993 ISBN 0-9204470-38-6
• An article of Chinese snake oil: Kunin RA. Snake oil. West J Med. 1989 Aug;151(2):208. No abstract available. PMID: 2773477 [PubMed - indexed for

MEDLINE] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Re- trieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=2773477&dopt=Abstract

See also

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• Snake oil (cryptography)
• Alchemy and elixir
• Goanna
• Golden hammer
• Magic bullet
• Silver bullet
• Universal panacea
• Quackery
• Traditional Chinese medicine

Metaphors | Quackery | Traditional Chinese medicine | Pejoratives | Schlangenöl