alternative medicine

A lack of regulatory oversight of supplements allows misleading labels and dangerous products to slip through the cracks and into American homes.

Pennyroyal is a species of mint with purple flowers. It smells like spearmint. And it has been used as an abortifacient for over two thousand years.

How the rise of alternative, "natural," medicines led Americans to equate food with moral character.

During WWI, the Surgeon General received numerous pitches for miraculous cures for sick and wounded American soldiers.

In the 19th Century, homeopathy was popular because of its use of small doses, its emphasis on the curative power of nature, and its holistic treatment of the body.

The history of "proving", the practice of auto-experimentation that forms the cornerstone of homeopathic medicine.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s nomination to lead HHS reflects the rising power of an anti-vaccination movement more than 100 years in the making.

Longevity enthusiasts are microdosing a 19th-century cure-all. Are they onto something?

The controversial career of John E. Mack, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Harvard psychiatrist who wrote best-selling books on UFO abduction.

His research ushered in the psychedelic renaissance. Now it's changing how he's facing death.

Although originalists fail to see it, abortion has had a long and storied history for American women.

Enslaved women's use of birth control, abortifacients, and even infanticide showed that they resisted by exerting control over their reproductive lives.

The Underground Railroad conductor's understanding of botany, wildlife biology, geography and astronomy allowed her to guide herself and others to safety.

An act of love in the form of a medicinal tonic.

Vaccine skepticism and misinformation have persisted since the smallpox epidemics. With the internet, it's only gotten worse.

The man who introduced mesmerism to the US was a slave-owner from Guadeloupe, where planters were experimenting with “magnetizing” their enslaved people.

Today’s “medical freedom” warriors are drawing on a centuries-old American tradition.

But the media is treating him differently than it treated Matthew Joseph Rodermund more than a century ago.

In 1850s Vermont, Achsa Sprague swore that the spirits who helped her walk again also possessed her with a crucial mission: freeing every soul in America.

On the rise and fall of radium in the beauty industry.

Osteopathy was founded by a 19th-century healer who believed the body was a self-healing machine.

In the early 1800s, David Hosack created one of the nation's first botanical gardens to further his pioneering medical research.

Did the bestselling self-help author do more harm than good for early patients with AIDS?

From Stonehenge to Silicon Valley: how technology nurtured New Age ideas in a world supposedly stripped of its magic.

The enigma of Samuel Clemens.

A mythical creature that lurks in the pinelands of New Jersey has served as a reminder of the horrors that result when reproductive freedoms are destroyed.

Without the local San Francisco activists who risked their lives for it, today’s legal cannabis market might never have come to be.

California cannabis breeding is at a crossroads.

The retail giant’s mail-order business reigned supreme for more than a century, offering everything from quack cures to ready-to-build homes.

The history of DIY transition offers one path toward what might come after, or in the place of, state-sanctioned care.