At his “Miracle Ranch” in California, Robert O. Young would charge up to $5,000 per day to treat cancer patients. As part of his recommended six-week stay, the father of the alkaline diet would analyse the blood of patients, make them veggie smoothies, and supply a range of pH-branded supplements. He would also offer a treatment of baking soda solutions, injected into the veins.
As you may have guessed, Young is no doctor. But for 25 years, up until his most recent arrest in the summer of 2022, the retired pro-tennis player from Utah peddled his life-threatening cures to sick and desperate Americans. He is not alone. Far beyond the familiar landscape of yoga, chiropractics and aromatherapy lies a Wild West of supposed cure-alls, many of them driven by small-scale entrepreneurs who hope to parlay a unique product or brand into a sprawling business empire. Such characters have always floated around the margins of America’s healthcare scene, but right now, fringe practitioners are having a moment. The alternative-medicine lobby that backs them has never been more powerful.
The story of its rise to power begins in the mid-Nineties, around the same time that Young first started dabbling in alternative health: pairing tennis-related diet and exercise advice with a line of branded dietary supplements. The supplement industry was going through a sea change, thanks to the nascent alternative healthcare lobby, which scored a massive and improbable victory in the halls of Congress in 1994. The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act broadened the definition of a food supplement to include almost any vitamin, mineral, plant or hormone. It also, critically, shifted the burden of proof away from manufacturers to the federal Food and Drug Administration, which had to identify dangerous products on a case-by-case basis, a resource-intensive prospect that allows tens of thousands of quacks to sell shady products with relative impunity.
This lax regulatory environment made selling supplements far more profitable. Between 1994 and 2002, the US supplement industry mushroomed from $4 billion in annual sales to $18.7 billion, and the number of dietary supplements advertised grew too, from 4,000 to 29,000. Bolstered by the efforts of its Republican Senator, Orrin Hatch, the supplement industry was centred in Utah, which became a sort of Silicon Valley of suspect health claims.
This was the ideal environment for Young, who rose to fame after publishing a bestselling book on the importance of an alkaline diet, The pH Miracle Diet, in 2000. The book was innocuous enough — it recommended exercise and a plant-heavy diet, and offered a blend of American can-doism and hucksterism that is tolerated, or even looked upon fondly, by the American public. This is where Young might have stayed, had his fantastical beliefs not led him down a much darker path.
The problem was that Young thought he had made a paradigm-shifting discovery: that germs were a myth, and that all diseases were caused by the body becoming overly acidic. When he began treating cancer patients at his upscale resort, a former grapefruit and avocado ranch in Valley Centre, he took his groundless theory even further. His de-acidifying treatments denied patients the chance to seek proper healthcare: Naima Houder-Mohammed, a 27-year-old captain in the British military with advanced breast cancer, drained her family’s finances to raise more than $77,000 (£62,700) to fund a visit to the Miracle Ranch.
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