‘ The market for unproven , debunked or traditional medicine was valued at 30 BILLION POUNDS in 2015 .’
composed of beef fat , red pepper and turpentine , with not a single drop of snake oil ( at least this duplicitousness was a good thing for the snakes : Stanley boasted he had killed 5,000 snakes to keep up with the demand for his sought-after product ). Stanley was fined a mere USD20 for breaches of the Pure Food and Drug Act ; the equivalent of about USD429 today .
Controlled , scientific , clinical trials have failed completely to demonstrate any of the potential health products derived from the Bengal Monitor ( Varanus bengalensis ) are supposed to treat everything from haemorrhoids , to rheumatism , pain and burns , and spider and snake bites . Likewise in Mexico , pills made from rattlesnakes are used to treat all sorts of ailments including skin and face blotches , sores , rashes , pimples , welts , varicose veins , acne and blackheads , stress , heart disease , diabetes , cancer , rheumatism , haemorrhoids , and sexual impotence ! main demand for folk remedies centres on their country of origin ( notable Brazil and various countries in Afric and Asia ), they are also growing in popularity in the Western world . Monique Roffey , awardwinning British writer and journalist , writes in The Independent how , ‘ Chinese herbalists are all the rage , with about 600 Chinese herbalist clinics established in Britain .’ It should be noted that really anything , be it plant or animal , used in Chinese medicine is referred to as a ‘ herb ’; lizards are a common ‘ herb ’ used to
‘ The market for unproven , debunked or traditional medicine was valued at 30 BILLION POUNDS in 2015 .’
benefits conferred upon animal parts by traditional medicine . At best these ingredients and the resulting concoctions are benign , however complications frequently arise ; for example , there have been at least 11 cases reported of serious extragastrointestinal infections from Salmonella arizona following the ingestion of rattlesnake folk ‘ remedies ’.
Furthermore , it is simply not possible that a single species can act as a panacea to treat a litany of unrelated diseases and conditions . In India ,
But although snake oil itself has largely gone out of favour , and despite advances in science and medicine , the trade in animal parts ( specifically reptiles ) by both snake oil salesmen and Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioners is thriving . In part this has been cultivated by fostering a distrust of modern medicine and ‘ big pharma ’, which is depicted as a series of greedy empires that profit from keeping people sick . Ironically , the market for unproven , debunked or traditional medicine was valued at 30 billion pounds in 2015 . Although the treat asthma .
In some cases , the purported medicinal properties of reptiles are of less importance than their magical or religious significance . Reptile parts are widely used to ward off ‘ evil spirits ’ to appease or invoke spirits or gods ; they are also fashioned into amulets which are routinely used in magical / religious diagnoses to protect the wearer from diseases or the ‘ evil-eye ’. In Brazil alone , 13 reptile species are used for this purpose . Although occasionally available whole , they are typically