|
Un
po' di storia degli strumenti in legno del Massaggio Dea+
I
Rulli da Automassaggio Vintage "Punkt
Roller"
-
La
Scienza contro -
Dall'autorevole
NCBI la ricerca scientifica del 2009 che
denigra pesantemente la folle FantaScienza
della presunta funzione dimagrante delle
miniventose dei rulli da automassaggio Punkt
Roller del primo dopoguerra, nonché di
altri strumenti che assicuravano allora il
medesimo miraggio. Eppure, come scritto, se
ne vendettero moltissimi.
From
plunger to Punkt-roller:
a century of weight-loss quackery
“People
trust the quack with their lives who would
not trust him with the loan of a sixpence.
They seem to believe advertised testimonials
as if they were guaranteed by a prominent
physician, forgetting that many obscure
prints can be got to write any falsehoods
and back up any quackery under the sun.
These lying testimonials are paraded in
papers that ought to know better than to
insert them, and the public believe in their
statements as if they were scientific truths.”1 —
Dr. Nathaniel Edward Yorke-Davies, 1901
From I
Love Lucy–style body jigglers, to
heated “slenderizing” jeans and tens of
thousands of fad diets, weight-loss quackery
has dominated this past century's snake-oil
market. While the marketing of hope will
always have its victims, with some of these
products it is truly difficult to understand
the mentality of the buyer. Did people in
the late 1800s really find hand-drawn
before-and-after testimonial pictures to be
compelling? Was there really a large German
market for the turn of the century's Punkt-roller, the
suction-cupped rolling pin? Were there
armies of jiggling bodies in basements
hoping their weight would bounce away?
Sadly,
the answer to all of those questions is a
resounding “yes”; preying on the
vulnerabilities often associated with
obesity has shown itself to be a lucrative
business.
Unfortunately,
it was not only unscrupulous business people
preying on the vulnerable, sometimes it was
medical doctors. Take for example Dr. Thomas
Lawton. In his 1917 book, The
Lawton Method of Weight Reduction, he
reports, “I have reduced the weight of
thousands of other people and can do it for
you. Get that firmly in your mind — you
are going to be brought to a normal,
comfortable and vigorously healthy weight.”2 What
was his method? Believe it or not it
involved using what looks like a toilet
plunger to “dissolve” fatty tissue.
Fad
diets are not new either. In Dr. C. Stanford
Read's 1909 book, Fads
and Feeding, he
soundly bashes a popular diet of the day,
the “Salisbury diet,” which apparently
involved consuming large quantities of
rump-steak, cod-fish and hot water. Read's
own recommendations seem similarly suspect.
They included living by the seaside, having
a, “tumblerful” of hot water half an
hour before breakfast and avoiding soups at
dinner while of course minimizing everything
that tastes good.3
Unfortunately,
even today it seems that the possession of a
medical degree does not automatically
guarantee that the holder possesses ethics,
morals or a respect for the scientific
method (see page 367). While it may be fair
to explain the turn-of-the-century doctors'
recommendations as being the products of a
belief-based, rather than our current
evidence-based focus to medicine, what of
our modern day Lawtons with their
financially driven weight-loss plans and
products?
So
while you view some of my collection of
memorabilia bear in mind that there is no
shortage of weight-loss collectibles in
today's marketplace and, as always, the
adage, “if it sounds too good to be true,
it probably is,” holds true today as much
as ever.
Yoni
Freedhoff MD Medical Director Bariatric
Medical Institute Ottawa, Ont.
CMAJ.
2009 Feb 17; 180(4): 432–433.
PMCID: PMC2638042
Per
accedere all'articolo originale, clicca
qui!
|
