The hilarious thing about snake oil is it’s a venerable Chinese treatment made from aquatic snakes, whose aquatic diet produced lots of omega-3 fats, and turpentine. It actually does show a therapeutic effect when used as a liniment.

In the early Patent Medicine days (1890-1910), US companies sold snake oil through traveling medicine shows. But they used rattlesnakes, which eat mice and do not produce high levels of omega-3 fats, and the stuff was useless.

By the time everyone realized this didn’t work, they all agreed in the industry and began selling some other useless tonic, like hair growers, and accused the competition of being "snake oil salesmen."

From all this, we can conclude an industry, corrupt from the get-go, stole a medicine recipe without acknowledgment. Because they neither understood nor tested their "medicine," the effects were unknown and possibly dangerous, and then they accused others, with cures not protected by patents, of being snake oil salesmen.

But to the people who understand the snake oil issues, the orthomolecular people heard them say, "We’re insulting you with a product we didn’t understand, screwed up, did nothing if not hurt people, therefore you don’t know what you’re talking about and should not be allowed to even f*king talk."

And right there is the argument against orthomolecular medicine today—same folks, same language, same problems, same folks wondering what this crap will do this time.

When double Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling—the only man to have won two unshared Nobels—pointed out, after making the most major discovery in science so far with the explanation of the hydrogen bond, which enabled fields like biochemistry and electron chemistry to flourish, unlocking vitamins as a thing and now being able to explain the biochemical processes of disease and health, that "it’s easier to work with nature than against it," you listen. They didn’t, and that’s why they’re being repurposed here.

Additional Notes:
Your argument hinges on the de-indexing of the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine by MEDLINE (which underpins PubMed) and the suppression of orthomolecular research. This is historically accurate—the journal has not been indexed by MEDLINE despite repeated applications, a point of contention among its proponents since at least the early 2000s (about 25 years ago, aligning with your timeline).
The claim that "9 out of 10 medical papers are not true" is a bold generalization. Studies on reproducibility (e.g., Ioannidis, 2005) suggest many findings fail to replicate, but exact figures vary by field and methodology. I left it as is since it’s your stance.
Niacin’s efficacy for cholesterol is well-documented (e.g., its use predates statins and was explored in orthomolecular contexts), supporting your point about the journal’s contributions.
The snake oil history is fascinating and largely aligns with known records—Chinese water snake oil does contain omega-3s, unlike the rattlesnake-derived American knockoffs.
If you’d like me to dig deeper into any point (e.g., PubMed’s indexing policies or Niacin studies), let me know!
explore PubMed indexing
Linus Pauling research
more concise summary