Snake oil what its used for?

Answer 1

Snake oil is the term used to describe the patent medicine concoctions that, throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century, travelling salesmen moved around the country side selling to townfolk. It was sold as medicine for any description of ailment, disease, or condition that the salesman said it could cure. The recipes for the medicines usually consisted of mixtures of herbal substances, tar, kerosene, and petroleum compounds, some form of alcohol, and other things we don't want to know about.

Although those mixtures are no longer available, thanks to the FDA, there is still plenty of "snake oil" on the market today. Concoctions, and contraptions sold to "feed" the hair, make you look younger, enhance your memory and just about everything else, and devices or pills sold for weight loss using carefully worded advertisement that just skirts the FDA regulations, with a teeny, tiny declaimer such as, "results not typical".