Public skepticism, in turn, will spike the guns of the friends of alternative medicine in the U.S. Congress who have, through legislation and intimidation, harassed and weakened the Food and Drug Administration. New laws will restore the power of the FDA not only to ban dangerous therapies pre-emptively but also to remove patently worthless products from health-food-store and drugstore shelves.

The coming years will also see the demise of the quack-laden Office of Alternative Medicine, which seven years ago was foisted on the reluctant National Institutes of Health, largely at the insistence of Tom Harkin, the otherwise sensible Senator from Iowa who believes in the curative powers of bee pollen. Talk about getting stung. Taxpayers will be incredulous when they become aware that after spending millions of dollars in its first seven years "investigating" highly questionable alternative therapies, the OAM failed to validate or--more significant--invalidate any of them (with the possible exception of acupuncture). And they'll be furious when they recall years from now that in 1998, as a reward from Congress for its failures, the agency was quietly elevated to a full-fledged NIH Center and given a budgetary raise: to $50 million annually.

Charades can't persist forever. In the years to come, as conventional medicine continues to make rapid advances and as the public becomes better informed about the deception and outright medical ignorance of many of these hucksters, alternative medicine will be consigned to what indeed is its rightful place: alongside snake oil, orgone booths and laetrile in the dustbin of medical history.

TIME contributor Leon Jaroff was founding editor of DISCOVER, in which his "Skeptical Eye" column skewered bogus science

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