WHEN Jim Laidler and his wife Louise, both doctors in Oregon, were informed that their two sons were on the autism spectrum, they were devastated. Conventional medicine offered no cure for the developmental disorder; intensive behavioural treatments might help, but they might not. Then the Laidlers heard about alternative therapies including chelation, a treatment in which patients ingest or are injected with chemicals that remove heavy metals from their bodies. The Food and Drug Administration had approved the technique for lead and mercury poisoning, but some doctors suggested it could cure autism. Mr Laidler was sceptical of some of the claims made by chelation champions, but he also knew science was fluid. Some treatments now accepted as standard once would have seemed outlandish. Besides, looking to alternative therapies allowed the Laidlers to feel something conventional medicine did not offer: hope.

Mr Laidler, who has since disavowed alternative autism interventions including chelation and special diets, recalls the physical and financial strain of shuttling back and forth from treatments and travelling with suitcases full of special foods. When Mrs Laidler secretly took one of their sons off his supplement regimen and found no change in behaviour, he had an epiphany: what he had perceived as improvements due to treatment were really just natural fluctuations.

Alternative treatments have long seduced Americans. In the decades leading up to 1950, thousands submitted themselves to the high-voltage shocks of “violet-ray generators”. Essentially a suitcase kitted out with an electrical control box and coils, the machine was hawked as a panacea for ailments from heart disease to paralysis. Others relied on Micro-Dynameter machines, which claimed to identify disease by measuring the electrical currents coursing through the human body. It was later revealed that they could not differentiate between a live person and a cadaver. These devices, as well as foot-powered breast-enlargement pumps, metal pods promising rejuvenation, and the Relaxacisor, a machine that promised to slim and tone women’s bodies through electrical shocks while they lay idle, are displayed in a wing at the Science Museum of Minnesota dedicated to quackery.

Today alternative medicine is just as popular. A study by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in 2012 established that one-third of adults use some sort of alternative treatment, mostly in addition to conventional medicine. The annual bill for such “complementary” interventions is about $34 billion. Despite the fact that the great majority of alternative treatments are either unproven or known to be rubbish, the discipline has also become more intertwined with conventional medicine. A recent study showed that 42% of American hospitals provided some sort of alternative therapies, up from 27% in 2005. Georgetown University offers masters degrees in complementary medicine, and the University of Arizona trains its medical students in the practice.

The government is also more involved than it once was. In the 1990s, inspired by a senator who believed bee pollen had cured his hay fever, Congress created a new branch within the National Institutes of Health to study unconventional health practices. It was called the National Centre for Complementary and Integrative Health, and in the decade to 2015 it received over $1.2 billion to investigate such questions as the health benefits of saunas and whether acupuncture works to alleviate pain related to fibromyalgia. Supporters of the centre say such trials will help sort out the effective treatments from the phoney ones. “We are looking at what the public is using—natural remedies and alternative pain treatments—and subjecting those to the scientific method to figure out what works and what doesn’t work,” says Dr David Shurtleff, the centre’s deputy director.

Stephen Barrett, a retired psychiatrist and director of quackwatch.org, believes the centre should be abolished. Chelation is the branch of quackery that most alarms him at the moment. He adds that the growth of misleading medical titles is also of concern. The Pastoral Medical Association in Texas licenses practitioners to provide “Bible-based” health services in 50 states and 30 countries. The requirements to obtain such accreditation are accommodating; many of the people listed in the association’s directory have no medical training and offer practices such as hair-mineral analysis and “raindrop therapy”, where patients are massaged with various oils meant to bring about “balance and electrical alignment”.

Sick people often seek help when they feel most ill. Like Mr Laidler, they may mistake the natural cycle of a condition for improvement caused by treatment. And while the web makes it easy for a layman researching crystal therapy (where a “healer” places small crystals at various points on patients’ bodies) to determine quickly that such a treatment has never been proved effective, it has also encouraged quacks. So long as they include disclaimers, anyone can slap up free websites offering treatments to help with baldness and pudginess, the flu and cancer. At best, people will waste money chasing such promises. At worst, they could get hurt.