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Chinese Medicine and the Use of Snake Oil

Talk about snake oil, and you will most likely think about traveling conmen who used to visit the various villages and townships as they were eked out of the dusty sands and green prairies by settlers. With promises of longevity, virility, fertility, and lasting beauty, these dubious purveyors of remedies would sell commonly useless concoctions with fantastic claims. Frequently borrowing heavily from the lore and scientific achievements of far away countries that most early Americans only knew to exist from books, the traveling conmen would claim to either be trained in the secrets of these medical breakthroughs by dying Chinese mystics, lone Native American raiders, or the famed writings of Arabic princes and Egyptian pharaohs made available to the learned in far away England.

Take for example Clark Stanley from Abilene. Even though he came at the tail end of the snake oil movement, this self proclaimed rattlesnake king made an act of charming, killing and then turning his rattlesnakes into the famous snake oil. Allegedly following a secret recipe passed on by a Moki medicine man, he set up his production of the substance in a grand scale.

It is important to understand that snake oil is actually a Chinese medicine that has long since been known to help with the symptoms of arthritis. It reached America when Chinese laborers would come to work for the railroad industry and bring with them their foreign concoctions. Since many white doctors would not touch those they believed to be "yellow", the Chinese laborers had to rely on their own remedies. In many cases they would share their cures and ointments with other laborers, irrespective of skin color. Thus the efficacy of snake oil was a known fact.

Back to Mr. Stanley from Abilene, when his concoction was analyzed, it was found to be little more than mineral oil and beet fat. The real thing, on the other hand, is known to contain only two ingredients: camphor and the oil of the Chinese water snake. Modern usage of the snake oil has found that it may quite possibly be the camphor and no so much the oil of the snakes that is contributing to the relief of pain associated with arthritis. This is not to say that there is no value to the actual rendered oil of the snakes. As a matter of fact, they may quite possibly be able to penetrate the skin and act on the area of the inflammation. Yet even in the best of scenarios, the relief experienced is only temporary.

Obviously this is a far cry from the promised cures the snake oil salesmen claimed to sell. Chinese medicine and the use of snake oil is a premier example of the somewhat unlucky combination of rudimentary understanding of a foreign medical concept, American enterprise, greed, and the gullibility of crowds who are willing to believe anything if sold properly. Sadly, the term snake oil is now known as a pejorative, thus eliminating it from the list of known pain medicines and not only giving alternative medicine a bad name in general, but traditional Chinese medicine in particular.