.On our Air America Radio station early on Saturday and Sunday mornings there is a program I listen to because it is there.  On it is a purveyor of medicinal products that will insure a healthy prostate if taken regularly.  It costs the usual $19.95 or $29.95 for an initial trial and three months if you find it immediately helpful. It is shameful that this “Liberal”, “Progressive” station allows it to advertise.

I listen to this medicine show for quackery is hugely entertaining if not sickening because you know the poor fools who fall for it are attracted to the faux science convincingly pulls the suckers in.  This put me in mind of a similar program from years ago when a Dr. Carleton Fredericks (not his real name) filled the air waves with his nostrums and “scientific” papers that promised that nutrition was the key to good health and long life. I had been trying to recall his name when it came to me. Then I started to write something about: Anybody Remember Dr. Carleton Fredericks?  Then I realized that all I had were memories of a mellifluous fake faintly European accent and his huckstering of “chelation” as a sure cure for conditions, researches his “company” had discovered.

Next I looked him up on the internet and found a 12 page report on the good Dr. written in 1965.  This was an expose of The Vitamin Healers and was an expose of Dr. Carleton Fredericks.  He had no degrees in Nutrition but became a professor in at least two universities who bought his ideas.

He was a regular on the radio and, I believe, was a part owner of summer camps that of course pushed open air and outdoor living as good for the development of young children.  I am not sure of his camp ownership but his smarmy voice was one that was hypnotically soothing. He hawked “natural” remedies and invoked obscure studies to prove his professional standing.

I just looked up “chelation” and found a tremendous number of articles about it, most of them denouncing quackery.  My memory of Dr. Fredericks is that he advocated chelation as a means of cleansing the blood of adulterants and just plain bad things he prescribed regular visits to have this done.  My memory is foggy but includes the mistaken idea that one would have his blood diverted into a machine that washed it and then returned it to the body.

We listen to a great deal of garbage paid for by these kooks and quacks who sell colored water and a bit of alcohol that will make you whole again. Fredericks was one of a kind, though.  He had degrees (although not in nutrition) and quoted science that sucked in the gullible. We get snookered every time.