The Fiber Story

Abstract

The search for a comprehensive explanation for the ills of humanity has led seekers of health down many garden paths. The snake oil peddlers of the nineteenth century touted remedies for everything from constipation to cancer, and faith healers, spiritual and pharmaceutical, continue to profit from the gullible. The credibility of important medical discoveries has been endangered by a tendency to generalize. Thus, with the discovery of cyanocobalamin, vitamin B₁₂ injections became a nostrum for complaints ranging from tired blood to bad nerves. Following Sir McFarlane Burnett’s exposition of the clonal selection theory, all sorts of conditions were attributed, without evidence, to autoimmunity. The concept of total environmental allergy is an absurd example of this tendency.

What thought so wild, what airy dream so light, That will not prompt a theorist to write?

George Crabbe