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Transcript of For the Love of History podcast episode 79: "Medical Quackery With Tegan Kehoe"

This is the transcript of For the Love of History podcast episode 79: "Medical Quackery With Tegan Kehoe." You can find the audio version here.


TK  

Welcome, welcome, welcome friend, I'm TK, your tour guide to the past and you are listening to for the love of history, the podcast where we talk about world history, women's history, and weird history. And it is a great day to be here because we have a guest. So our guest is the wonderful history author, Tegan. And because she can introduce herself better than I can, I'm gonna hand it off to her. Go ahead.


Tegan Kehoe  

Hello, thank you for having me. My name is Tegan Kehoe, and I am a public historian, and a museum curator, educator, and a writer. And my one of my focuses is medical history. And so it fits in very well with weird history and women's history and can fit in with world history, my area is American medical history. But what I focus on is not just official medical science, I also like to look at the ways that unofficial medicine has played a role in people's lives, whether or not it actually works. And so that's kind of some of the weird history that that I wanted to talk about today.


TK  

Yay, I love that ticking to the three boxes and three of the three boxes from time to time. So I'm really excited because medical history is not really in my realm of knowledge. So I'm excited to hear about our topic today, which is medical machines. Tell us more about it.


Tegan Kehoe  

Yeah, absolutely. So throughout, really, throughout history, but especially since about the Industrial Revolution, plenty of people have made machines that are supposed to help people with health in one way or another. And a lot of them are fake. And there's a particular story that I'm kind of enamored with, which is Dr. Albert Abrams, who was working in the early 20th century. He was a real medical doctor, that's sometimes been questioned, but historians have found evidence that he did receive a medical degree. But in the 1910s, he started publishing things that his colleagues in the medical field were kind of looking sideways at because his evidence didn't line up. And also because it was out there. He was interested in spondylotherapy for a while, which is pounding on someone's spine as a way to cure them. Things --


TK  

Like you shouldn't touch people's spines. That's like the that's the no-no zone.


Tegan Kehoe  

Yeah, well, I mean, it was kind of similar to chiropractic practice, which is also controversial in the medical world. He wasn't the only person thinking about it. But that was sort of the first publications that he wrote that were departures from what his colleagues would say, Yes, this is science. But then he started his own field of medicine, you could say, called the electronic reactions of Abrams. So his name was Abrams. So he named it after himself. 


TK  

Love that for him.


Tegan Kehoe  

And it was him ERA for short. Yeah. You know, a lot of things in medicine are named after people. And a lot of the time, they're not named by the person who invented it, someone later, you know, a colleague or someone else starts calling it so and so's thing.

 

TK  

Yeah. 


Tegan Kehoe  

Abrams skipped that step named it after himself to begin with. And so his his theory was, it changed a little bit depending on when you asked him, but essentially, that everything in our bodies and our health is governed by electronic waves that are kind of a consequence of the fact that matter is made up of subatomic particles, including electrons. And those electronic waves can be read by particular machines, and they can be manipulated by other machines. And so he's using kind of the sometimes using sort of the stuff of electrical and electronic equipment like electrical switches and resistors and transistors and that sort of thing to create these devices. I say sometimes because sometimes the devices had some, you know, dials and wiring on the outside and almost nothing on the inside. So sometimes anything at all.


TK  

Ohhh! Oh my gosh, this very much gives me like Frankenstein vibes like Frankenstein's monster, using electricity to bring people back to life kind of a thing.


Tegan Kehoe  

Yeah. And they're about a century apart. But I think that's actually an excellent analogy, because even though they're a century apart, that time period had this sort of people granted a lot more power, fantastical power to electricity than we would today. Today, it's so mundane. You know, electricity is, you know, we have batteries everywhere. We have outlets, you know, spaced a certain amount apart in our home and we're - a modern home can't have fewer than a certain number of electrical outlets because -- 


TK  

Yeah,


Tegan Kehoe  

that's a fire hazard, because it's just assumed that people will have so many devices to plug in. Electricity just is not a it's not considered high tech anymore, let alone --

TK  

 Yeah, 


Tegan Kehoe  

considered fantastical. And granted that'a speaking from a place of, you know, economic privilege, and there's a lot of infrastructure, there are parts of the world where electricity is not a given. But this idea of that electricity or then electrons could be could have that level of power. Yeah, I think that that Frankenstein, Frankenstein is a great example. And in the intervening years, in about the quarter century before Abrams was really doing his thing, physicists had started to understand subatomic particles and started to understand the fact that particles have a charge; they can be positive or negative. And so the concept of electrons was pretty new, past 15 ish, 20 ish years at the time that Abrams was first stating his theories. Um, he first published something about the ERA in 1916. And, oh, what is his name? Robert Millikan, a physicist had won the Nobel Prize in 1910 for identifying electrons' negative charge. So that's sort of the level of recency here. 

TK  

Yeah, yeah. 


Tegan Kehoe  

And with that recency, and with that kind of excitement of the general public is just starting, it's just sort of starting to filter into the public consciousness, that the cutting edge of science includes things that can be called Electronic, because we have this word electron now. And -- 


TK  

Yeah!


Tegan Kehoe  

and electrical charges are even more fundamental to physical reality than we had thought a generation earlier. And I think that that excitement kind of explains why people bought it, because Abrams was doing some really wacky, out there things. One of the things that fascinates me is that he, so many of his diagnostic machines, were supposed to read the electrical or electronic activity in a person's body. And so he could diagnose a person supposedly, by using this machine on them. But if the person couldn't be present, they could send a drop of blood, and he would just do it on the drop of blood, which reminds me of some more recent medical scams, but the way he would supposedly do this with a drop of blood, is he would put the drop of blood in some part of this machine, but then still hook that machine up to a person. And the person would be like a young, healthy man with no known health problems, who had of course, already been scanned by this device to assure that he had no known health problems. And he's like the proxy, where, since he's going to be totally neutral on this scan, then anything that's being read on this scan would be from that blood sample. 


TK  

Does the person hold the blood sample? What is what's happening with this blood? Do they please tell me they don't drink it...


Tegan Kehoe

That's a great question! No, no, at least not to my knowledge. So typically, the sample was placed. It's kind of a system of different wires. So this sample is placed and then there's wires leading to a different part of the machine. And then there's the reagent. So the proxy is called a reagent because it's supposed to be electronic reactions. So you you introduce a reagent to be able to see the reactions. I don't actually remember, I'm sorry -- 


TK  

It's okay! 


Tegan Kehoe  

If he's hooked up to the wires or whether it's just his presence. And then his body is the one drummed upon so it was they would measure - "measure", in quotation marks - these things by tapping above the abdomen, and then in different areas of the abdomen. And you would get a different sound in different areas, which, so far, so good, different parts of the body sound different when you tap on them, and then measure like draw a line on the person demonstrating where that sound changed, and then apply an electrical frequency, not like shocking the person but just kind of turn on the machine to a particular frequency. Do it again and measure the difference in where the sound changed. And that's where we get into "okay, but that doesn't work." And so one of the things I really love about this story is that Scientific American covered him extensively. So Scientific American, as you know, probably most listeners know is a well respected Science magazine that's for the general public. It's not for scientists, you know, what I learned in reading about this is it goes back to 1845. So it is a very old and well respected science magazine. And so in 1923, in 1924, they did a 12 part series investigating the ERA. And it's really well written, I wish they would rerelease it, like just so that people could just buy a copy of all 12 articles without -- I get it through my library, because my library subscribes to the database JSTOR so I've been able to read these. -- but it's just very engagingly written and the magazine was saying, you know, we've been getting a lot of letters from people either saying, "Please debunk ERA," or please share the good News of ERA with the world. And because, you know, this was really, really popular. And so people were excited about it. And people had opinions on on both sides. Some people were not sure what to think. And they wanted an authority, other people made up their mind, and they wanted, you know, to that to be shared. So the first couple of articles, for the most part, are written in a way that's it sounds like they're, they're keeping an open mind, and that the magazine and the authors of the article are just saying, okay, you know, we're going into this. 


TK  

Yeah.


Tegan Kehoe  

I suspect that a little of that was a show because very few people in the scientific community were, I want to say, taken in by this.


TK  

Yeah. They were not down with the Abrams, they were like euuhhh, fishy.


Tegan Kehoe  

Right, right. I mean, think of any of the big fad diets or quack medicine today that's just totally out there.


TK  

This is very much like Goop-like. 


Tegan Kehoe  

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.


TK  

It's very Goop-y.


Tegan Kehoe  

Yeah. And then this is, you know, a magazine getting a bunch of letters saying, you know, the equivalent of "please cover, you know, jade eggs, they changed my life," or, "Please stop my sister from buying more things that Goop recommends." 


TK  

Exactly.


Tegan Kehoe  

This is the equivalent. And except that it's happening in in the 1920s. 


TK  

Yeah. 


Tegan Kehoe  

And so, so they're doing this investigation. And so they have a reporter go to a doctor that they just call Dr. X for anonymity, who is someone who is practicing the ERA method. And then the plot kind of thickens, because this doctor was training other people in his method, selling or renting his machines. So it gets it gets a little pyramid scheme-y. But there is there is a little bit of gray area in, real medical devices do need to be manufactured by someone, and then they're sold to other people. And that's not necessarily a pyramid scheme. 


TK  

Yeah, that's what my husband does. That's his job. 


Tegan Kehoe  

Oh, wow.


TK  

So yeah. 


Tegan Kehoe  

So there definitely are things in common between fake science and real science. So it can be easy -- And I think that's one of the great things about the the Scientific American articles is that it can be easy to go into something like this with a lens and you keep seeing evidence for your own point of view. Like, of course, that's fake, look at this pyramid scheme. Well, he's manufacturing something and selling it to other people that that's something that legitimate, medicine does as well. But the further you go on, and the more you learn about this, it's no longer scientifically ambiguous. These things didn't work, ERA isn't real. And so going into it with an open mind is helpful, but you get answers when you do that.


TK  

Yeah. And did they get those answers?


Tegan Kehoe  

So they did, but they kept getting them over and over again, in part because people kept throwing throwing new objections at them. So in one of the first articles, this reporter is going, he is both examined by one of these machines by this, this Doctor X who's an ERA practitioner. And apparently, he's told that he has 14 ohms of malaria, because the severity of a disease was measured in electrical terms, because the machines we're supposed to be doing this. But fourteen ohms of malaria isn't a big deal. You have to have like over 20 for it to even have symptoms. But then there are other diseases where even like five ohms would be a big deal. And so this reporter is describing this, and I'm just imagining the reporter.


Unknown Speaker  

Yeah, the reporter is just...


Tegan Kehoe  

Yeah, [Laughter]


TK  

[Laughter] Just trying to hold it together like we are right now.


Tegan Kehoe  

Exactly. Like try to keep a straight face, which thankfully, we don't have to do.


TK  

No, right? We can make fun of Abrams as much as we want, because he's dead.


Tegan Kehoe  

Yep. Died halfway through the series that Scientific American was publishing.


TK  

No way!


Tegan Kehoe  

They kept pulishing the series after his death, and yeah, but he had so much influence that it made sense to continue debunking him even when the man was no longer around. Yeah, so the 14 ohms of malaria is even just kind of a side note in that article, because what this group is doing, they brought a series of germ cultures (so, you know, germs grown in a vial) to be tested in this machine, so that they knew what germ was being grown. And so it was, you know, can you -- can this machine correctly identify which diseases these are? 


TK  

Yeah. 


Tegan Kehoe  

And I think there were four of them. The first one, Dr. X got it wrong. But that was the, you know, he said it was one thing, it was actually another that was the end of it. But then for the others, he diagnosed this whole slew of diseases, when it was actually just 


TK  

The one.


Tegan Kehoe  

It was just one germ culture. Yeah. And the, the idea of a whole slew of diseases comes up a lot with Abrams, and also a number of other kind of fringy diagnostic things, because they're claiming to be so much more sensitive and accurate than mainstream medicine. It's also a really great way to scare people, as you know, "you have five different really serious diseases. And you know, they're latent right now, but they might pop up."


TK  

You've got 27 ohms of... measles!


Unknown Speaker  

Yeah, right. And the same way that today, your juice cleanse is getting rid of all of these things you didn't know you had. Which... juice is great. Juice cleanses, not scientifically supported. And I'm referencing these modern things, I know there are plenty of differences between the specifics, but sort of the the general case here. So yes, slew of different diseases. And the reporter and the other people with the reporter say, well, that's that's not possible, because this is a germ culture. And so Dr. X, comes up with a couple of different reasons that it must have been wrong. So it's, well, you know, first of all, it's, "oh, let me try it again." And then it's at one point, it's, "oh, well, there's handwriting on this. It must be the electronic waves from the person who wrote the label on this.


TK  

No!


Tegan Kehoe  

"who wrote, like, Specimen 1234." And Abrams practitioners did sometimes diagnose people who had just sent a handwriting sample. So that was actually kind of internally consistent. For the fact that I mean, A it doesn't work and B he didn't bring it up until his results were wrong. He didn't bring it up before then he says, "oh, there's also a red border on this label. And the color red is," -- I don't remember if it was the color red or red ink, but one of those two -- "just wreaks havoc on our machines." Then it was "oh, well, this label was probably licked by someone when it was put on the vial. And so that person's diseases are also in this," at which point the bacteriologist in the group says, "Wait a minute, we don't lick things in bacteriology."


TK  

[Laughter]


Tegan Kehoe  

 I love that bacteriologist because she shows up a couple of times in these articles. At one point, I don't remember if it was Abrams or one of his followers, claimed to have cleared Typhoid Mary of typhoid. "Cleared" it is how they would refer to curing someone because they were talking about you know, clearing the energy and yeah, one


TK  

Yeah, yeah. The, the ohms of typhoid. Right.


Tegan Kehoe  

And this bacteriologist worked for the New York City Health Department and this is during the era of Typhoid Mary. Yeah, she was forcibly hospitalized twice, and there was a period of time in between when she was still working. And so this bacteriologist was intimately familiar with that case. She says, if you did clear her of typhoid, it came back. 


TK  

Yeah, right? 


Tegan Kehoe  

She definitely is still a carrier for typhoid. That is, that is validated, that is known. So I really think that those articles you know -- I don't mean to do an advertisement for you know, Scientific American, but those articles 


TK  

They are not sponsoring this episode.


Tegan Kehoe  

And definitely not, you know, the editorial board of the 1920s.


TK  

Right.


Tegan Kehoe  

But those articles are such a great window into "okay, we're going to try to take this seriously." And every time something goes wrong, the practitioners are throwing out new objections that they didn't have before about what could have happened. And I think that approaching things with a healthy level of skepticism, I mean, it is a part of science. And so, you know, a good scientist when approached with something that sounds like complete bullshit is going to -- if, if it's their area, if they're actually investigating it -- is going to look at "okay, well, is it possible I'm missing something?" 


TK  

Yeah. 


Tegan Kehoe  

"What would giving this a fair trial look like in terms of experimental design?" And sometimes you don't need that, because there's just no, no mechanism for this to happen. Like, the oscilloclast, which is one of Abrams devices, supposedly cured people by breaking up the damaging waves coming from their body. And you open it up, and it's, it's just a machine that makes a ticking noise. That literally all it does.


TK  

What? No! 


Tegan Kehoe  

Yeah, no, this, this is like cartoon level of fakery. And so you don't really need to give oscilloclasts a fair trial, because you already know there's no mechanism by which this could work. But Scientific American is still trying to show people "okay, so even if we, even if we assume that somehow this works, you know, let's, let's try it." And then Dr. Abrams himself is saying, "Oh, well, you went to an uncertified Abram's practitioner, so that doesn't count. Here's a list of certified ones." And then the certified ones are saying, "Oh, well, we've actually... some of us have expanded on Dr. Abrams' theories. And he's not the be all end all. He came up with a system and we've improved on it." Which that part again, sounds like science, because  this kind of one charismatic person is more a hallmark of fake medicine. And this, "oh, well, you came up with this thing and then we refined it" is actually what happens in real science as well. But they're using something that doesn't work. And I think -- so it's always fascinating to try to suss out whether someone who is promoting something that doesn't work is a true believer, or is a scammer. You can't always suss it out. Because they'll say many of the same things. But I mean, I believe I fully believe that Dr. Abrams was a scammer, at least for the majority of his career. Because,


TK  

Yeah, I mean, the box that was empty and then just ticked, like, you can't say, you can't be like, "yeah, no, this is a real thing" and fully believe that, because it's a ticking box.


Tegan Kehoe  

Right. And he would rent the machines as well as sell them. And when he rented them, the practitioner who was leasing them had to sign something saying they wouldn't open the box, which, of course, in their theory was because you could mess up the calibration. But -- 


TK  

The issue is, yeah --


Tegan Kehoe  

maybe it's because you'll find out that --


TK  

 right. It's just an empty box.


Tegan Kehoe  

Right. But I also, I mean, I find this kind of thing, really funny, but I also, the more I learn about any particular fake medicine, but especially Abrams, because I'm, I'm into this story, the more I do understand how people could have gotten there in terms of the patients. So it's, you know, we talked already about how fascinating the idea of electrons and electronics, and even just electricity, were to the general public at the time, this doctor claiming that he has a new application of this physics breakthrough that happened less than a decade ago. That part sounds like "Well, yeah, I mean, he knows a lot more about science than I do. He may well, you know, know this thing." So that part feels incredible, but actually makes a lot of sense that some people would believe it. 


TK  

Yeah. 


Tegan Kehoe  

And then there's the kind of general phenomenon that happens, both in his day and in ours, where many, many people for one reason or another become alienated from scientific medicine. Scientific medicine has gotten a lot more scientific in the last 150 years or so. Things like controlled trials are actually fairly historically new. And so scientific medicine is is a lot more trustworthy than it was in Abrams day, or 100 years before that. But there are also just people who are becoming alienated not because the science doesn't work, but because of bad experiences they've had. You know, if you or a loved one has had a horrible disease, and science either wasn't able to help or was only able to help up to a point. You know, we see this with cancer survivors and who don't survive, er, see a loved one not survive, or someone who has just been treated really poorly by a doctor, which there are plenty of people both then and now.


TK  

So many stories. So many stories.


Tegan Kehoe  

Yeah, people for whom the culture of scientific medicine, not necessarily the science itself is really opposed to their own cultural values. Whether it's because they have cultural beliefs or religious beliefs about what health and illness means, or whether, you know, there's just a lot of issues of trust that can come up. 


TK  

for sure. 


Tegan Kehoe  

Or if you've never had access to a health care practitioner who speaks your native language, like there's so many reasons. Or if just the health care you need is really expensive, and someone else says, "Hey, I've got this thing for $5 that will cleanse your energy and cleanse your body" Or this thing for $50 or this thing for $500. There's, you know, kind of levels of people being drawn into these ideas. But there are a lot of reasons that the options that are being presented as the only options might, might suck for people. And people in that position are much more likely to be interested when someone says, Hey, I've got this other thing.


TK  

That can definitely cure you. Sick, I mean, sick people, and people who have sick loved ones will do anything for a chance to have the person that they love and care about, or themselves have that chance to be better. And that's the part that's not funny. That's the part that wants to make me like, get in a time machine, punch Abrams in the face and be like, "Stop, just stop, please."


Tegan Kehoe  

Yeah, it's predatory when people have these fake medical ideas, and then sell them to people. Some people are going without real medicine, because they're, you know, I mean, this is also the Goop phenomenon is people going without real medicine because they're interested in these these fake things. And that's not to say that the scientific establishment has a monopoly on the truth. But things that are real can be proven by the scientific method, even if they didn't originate from a scientist. And so it's so frustrating when you remember how many people are, are taken in by this kind of thing. 


TK  

Yeah, 


Tegan Kehoe  

So the other thing I want to talk about -- I mean, we could, we could go on just about, just about him forever. So the reason that I learned about Abrams is that I actually wrote a book in the past couple of years, it just came out in February. And it's called Exploring American Healthcare through 50 Historic Treasures.


TK  

And I'll put a link to that in the show notes. 


Tegan Kehoe  

Thank you. Yes, it's published by the American Association for State and Local History, which is a professional organization in my fields. And they they're a co publisher have Rowman and Littlefield, which is a large indie publisher that does kind of academic and museum, and then a couple of other fields of, you know, areas that are publishing things that are sort of mixture of academic and public type work, which is exactly what what my book is, is that it's, you know, researched from a scholarly perspective, but it's for a general audience. 


TK  

Nice


Tegan Kehoe  

And so when I came up with the idea for the book, it was because the publisher had sent out a call for proposals for books in this format, which is a particular topic within American history, in as they call it, 50 historic treasures, meaning in 50 objects, and specifically in this series, objects that are in museums or at historic sites across the US. So sometimes, rather than an object, it's the historic site itself is the sort of the feature. And so this concept isn't unique to this publisher. Lots of people publish the sort of "history in 50" kind of things. But this particular series, they wanted to specifically focus on specific individual objects in museums, whether it was a unique object or one that many museums have. And so this book has 50 different topics. And this goes back to what I mentioned at the beginning about being interested in both scientific medicine and other ways that health care shows up in people's lives. So I have a short chapter on faith healing and chapters on parts of scientific medicine that ended up being dead ends, you know, people were really interested in sharing people with what was called blue mass or calomel, which was a mercury compound. And there are some mercury compounds used in medicine today, but they're not ones that put mercury into your body in a way that your body will be poisoned by. 


TK  

Thanks for that, science.


Tegan Kehoe  

Calomel's the opposite. You would get mercury poisoning from from calomel. And that was a really common treatment in the early 19th century. 


TK  

No thank you.


Tegan Kehoe  

So, my book is very brief introductions to many different subjects. And I was looking for an artifact that could represent quack machinery. And so it was looking at a number of museums. There's a great museum in Minneapolis, the Bakken Museum. I actually haven't been there. That was particularly weird about researching this book, largely during the pandemic. I developed relationships with a number of museums that I have not yet visited. So I wrote myself a hell of a bucket list while I wrote this book. But the, the Bakken Museum has a great collection of what they consider fringe technology. And they're careful to say fringe because they are not judging whether something was quack or not, whether it was real or not, whether it was true believers or scammers who were proponents of these devices. And I think that's a really interesting and useful perspective to take. 


Transcribed by https://otter.ai


Tegan Kehoe  

Oh, and one other story I'd like to share about my own experiences with this. So after -- before the book came out, but after it was finished, after my part was finished, and it was, you know, being printed and laid out, (and all of those wonderful things that I'm very glad there are other professionals who can do, because I'm not the layout expert, or a printer or any of those things). But my husband and I were in New Hampshire, and we were we were there to hike Mount Washington, but we also spent, you know, a day just kind of being tourists. And so we were in this small town near one of the trailheads of Mount Washington. And so we went to the local historical society, because that's what I do when I'm a tourist, one of the things I do. And that turned out to be a really interesting, mostly volunteer run Historical Society that talked a lot about that town's history as a paper mill town, which I knew almost nothing about. But then the building itself had been owned by a local doctor in the early to mid 20th century. And so he had lived in the upstairs and then had his offices as a doctor in the basement. So the tour actually started in the basement, which was set up with --


TK  

 Creepy... 


Tegan Kehoe  

-- his doctor's office. And the tour guide was telling us about this doctor, and it became increasingly clear that the doctor was someone who was trying things from all different modalities, fake and real, mostly fake. And so he was, you know, this very fringy doctor. But then also, as the tour went on, it became clear that our tour guide didn't see a problem with it, and seemed to believe that this doctor was kind of on the up and up. And he pointed out this one machine that -- he claimed the FDA was going to take away from the doctor, but the doctor hid it. And I took a photo of that machine. And it looked, it looked like maybe an old fashioned radio combined with like a soundboard or lightboard for theater, just all the different switches and dials that you can imagine on this one, you know, wooden cabinet around this machine, you know. So I thought that was really cool. And you know, my husband and I are like surreptitiously giving each other glances. We're the only ones on the tour. It's one of those places where you show up and the docent says, "Would you like a tour?" "Sure." "We're the whole group." "Great, all right, personal tour."


TK  

Love that.


Tegan Kehoe  

 As the tour went on, we started to realize, the tour guide's comments started to make it clear, he grew up in that town. This was an older gentleman, he had been a patient of this doctor, like from childhood. 


TK  

What...


Tegan Kehoe  

So this was his family doctor. And so that's why he was, you know, presenting this guy's forays into all sorts of different therapies as just totally normal. And some of it you know, he's in this rural town, this this doctor got interested in dentistry and purchased a bunch of dental equipment and started being the town dentist as well. Some of that makes some sense, other than the fact that you really should have a dental degree to do that.


TK  

You should really, just, not being going and drilling into people's mouths.


Tegan Kehoe  

Right, regardless of whether you have some other qualifications. 


TK  

Crazy!


Tegan Kehoe  

So you can both understand it and also go, "wait no, travel however far you need to go to someone who's actually trained." And so later in the trip, we were you know, sitting waiting for something waiting for our takeout or something like that and I was going back through my photos. And I said, you know, I'm going to look up this device that I took this picture of that was this, you know, contraband because the government doesn't know want you to know the real, the real thing.


TK  

The FDA... the truth!


Tegan Kehoe  

 It was a Dr. Abrams device. It was one that Dr. Abrams had sold. 


TK  

I thought that's what you were gonna say! Full circle, full circle. 


Tegan Kehoe  

Yup. Yup. Yeah.


TK  

Oh, my gosh. That's so so cool. So weird. Science is bananas, and so is medicine and you can't make this stuff up, I swear reality is weirder than fiction.


Tegan Kehoe  

Right, right. No, it it sounds, it sounds fake, when you say that, you know, someone was selling these devices, was massively popular, that major magazines were devoting 12 articles to trying to debunk these empty boxes. But you know, it's not because people are stupid. It's because people can be manipulated. And there are, you know, good techniques to manipulate people.


TK  

Yeah, yeah, there are.


Tegan Kehoe  

And and I don't want to sound like I'm saying that scientific medicine never gets things wrong. But what I what I do want to say is that good scientists correct themselves when they get things wrong, or other scientists correct them and the the field of scientific medicine, certainly there's corruption, certainly there are problems. But overall, it is getting more and more things right, as time goes on, because people are invested in fixing it when there are problems, Fixing it when there's when there is an experiment that goes "oh, well, we were we were using the wrong germs. So obviously, we got the results wrong." You know, when there is something just wild like that.


TK  

Yeah, the red ink.


Tegan Kehoe  

Yeah, yeah. But, you know, real science keeps trying to improve.


TK  

Yeah. And that's the wonderful thing about science. And I'm glad there's people out there that can do it. Because my brain doesn't work that way. Thank you so much for being here. That was wonderful and enlightening. And I love the full circle nature of your research and then going to that random museum. That poor old man who gave you that tour.


Tegan Kehoe  

Thank you so much -- 


TK  

. Yeah, absolutely.


Tegan Kehoe  

Thank you so much for having me, giving me the opportunity to bubble on about this topic, because it was really fun.


TK  

No, yeah, it was great. I know everybody who's listening right now is going to absolutely just enjoy everything. And I know they're going to love it so much that they're going to want to know how to find you in other places. So give us all of your socials, all of the things where can we find you? What projects are you doing? We want to hear about everything?


Tegan Kehoe  

Sure, thank you. So I try to make it so that if you can spell my name you can find me. So my website is tegankehoe.com. And my Twitter handle is Tegan Kehoe. And I'm a little less active on Twitter these days, but I'll be back eventually. Same with Instagram. And I have a bookshop.org site. Bookshop.org is a an indie bookstore alternative to some of the larger book retailers. And so I am in their affiliate program. So if you if you search my name Tegan Kehoe on bookshop.org, you'll find me there as well. That's also a great place to find my book. My book is also sold by the mega corporations, so search your favorite mega corporation book selling website and find me there as well. And I also, people who are interested in my book, I really encourage you to get it from your library as well. It's... it's more important that you read it then then you buy it. But also that helps other people find it, especially if you request it from your library if they don't already have a copy. People can can find me in a variety of places and they can find my book in a variety of places.


TK  

I will put all of Tegan's socials and links and all of the things that she just talked about in the show notes below. So please check her out, get the book, go to the library, but also just like trying to try to buy the book to like help her out a little bit [laugh]. And find Tegan wherever you can. So thank you so much for being here with us.


Tegan Kehoe  

Thank you so much.


TK  

 And yeah, I hope we see you again. 


Well, my friend thank you so much for joining Tegan and I in this episode. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. My flabbers are thoroughly gasted. Can you believe that man had the audacity to sell an empty box that ticks? History's bananas. Absolutely bananas. So thank you again for joining us in this episode if you enjoyed it, leave a rating and a review, or send me a message letting me know what you thought about this episode. And do something that makes you happy today and every day. Drink your water and I will see you next Friday when we talk about Minamata, Japan's poison secret. Okay. Bye! 


Why is there a metronome right now? Okay.

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