Say, do you have cancer? Well, never fear. Your friendly local aromatherapist has some coconut oil scent which will stimulate the nerves in your nose. You'll be cured in no time!
Maybe you're deaf. Well, never fear. Your friendly local chiropractic will yank your spine around, and fix your "vertebral subluxation", and you'll be able to hear. You'll be cured in no time!
Maybe The Loins Sleep Tonight. Well, never fear. Your friendly local homeopath will take some medicine, dilute it about 60 billion times, and, uh, whack the bottle against a leather-bound book...you'll be cured in no time!
Or, maybe you've fallen victim to a quack.
A Quack Doctor pretends to be a doctor or other health care professional but actually practices fake science and fake cures, possibly due to being a Con Artist trying to separate gullible rubes from their money. The best case scenario is that the rube will lose their money, figure out that they were scammed, and seek treatment from a real doctor. Worse case scenarios lead to the suffering and death of the patient either from their disease going untreated, or the supposed "cure" being actively harmful. They may have a Phony Degree in order to be extra convincing.
Compared to a Back-Alley Doctor, which involves a medical procedure being done illicitly, either because the procedure itself is illegalnote , or because the person needing the procedure can't go to a regular hospitalnote . The Back Alley Doctor may actually be competent and capable of performing a legit medical procedure, while the Quack Doctor by definition cannot do so. Of course, someone could be both.
The Quack Doctor is also related to the Snake Oil Salesman, who makes a living by selling ridiculous fake medicines; and the Fake Faith Healer, who claims to be able to heal people through miraculous supernatural powers, often in a religious context. The Quack Doctor has an official right to perform medicine; it is just that it is better if he doesn't.
A Sub-Trope of The Con. Compare with Dr. Feelgood, who is really just delivering intoxicating drugs, but may be pretending to treat some sort of illness. Compare Morally Ambiguous Doctorate, when the "Doctor" in question isn't specifically a con artist, but straight-up evil, and compare and contrast with Obscene OB-GYN, where the doctors are legitimate, but they still use their occupation for perverted purposes. Occasionally crosses over with The Barnum. If played for laughs, may result in Comically Inept Healing; sometimes, it might even feature an actual duck as a Visual Pun.
Due to modern controversies, no Real Life entries from the last 50 years please unless convictions or at least press recognition was made to the alleged doctor's quackery.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Black Jack: Black Jack talked a quack doctor through performing surgery on him, which the quack had never done before; soon after, the quack declared his intention to go to medical school for real.
- One Piece: In the past, Dr. Hiruluk was often called a wandering quack doctor who made the lives of his patients worse. He's not doing it for conning people, though; he's just really inept at medicine but has a desire to help sick people since he was cured of a heavy illness in the past.
Art
- In Marriage A-la-Mode, Monsieur de la Pillule, the doctor visited by the Earl in the third picture of the series, is heavily implied to be a charlatan: several of the articles in his room (such as a crocodile with an ostrich egg hanging from it) are assembled without any sense or order, a narwhal tusk and a comb suggest that he started as a barber rather than a medic, and an image of the gallows tree is viewed as an implication that his "healing" almost got him hanged.
Comic Strips
- Dondi: Dondi finds himself put under the care of Doctor Helix, a lauded child psychologist. This doctor prides himself on his handling of difficult and disturbed children, for which he charges a hefty fee. Dondi at first is adversarial to the doctor's methods. However, when some reporters come to interview Doc Helix, Dondi gushes about all the fancy degrees the man has earned. One reporter recognizes a known diploma mill, and soon all the doctor's degrees are discovered to be bogus; the man is a glorified and overpaid babysitter at best.
- Lucky Luke: Doctor Doxey is a fake doctor who travel from town to town selling a miracle elixir that allegedly cures illness and restores strength and vigor.
Films — Live-Action
- After the Thin Man: Dr. Kammer is a quack psychologist who doesn't seem to have much in the way of skills other than giving injections and testifying in court that clients are insane. His stunned comment after the murderer is dragged away raving: "My god. I was right. He really was crazy."
- Catch Me If You Can has Frank Abagnale, a teenage con artist who poses as having several professions throughout the film including a doctor. He gets away with it for a while by working as a supervisor who spends most of his time behind a desk and letting the residents make the real diagnoses. However, being confronted with genuine medical emergencies causes him to realize that he can't continue the scam without potentially killing someone, so he hastily jumps into a less dangerous line of work.
- Deadpool: In the film's first act Wade Wilson, who is suffering from cancer, finally reaches his personal Despair Event Horizon when he goes to Mexico to a "psychic healer" and figures out how the doctor does his scam a couple of minutes after being attended. This is what makes him decide to accept the invitation of "Agent Smith" to become part of a Super-Soldier creation program where he will eventually become Deadpool.
- Dr. Kildare. The patient that the title character has been surreptitiously watching in The Secret of Dr. Kildare is taken to a quack who promotes himself as a "Nature and sub-healer" using "electro-vibrations". Kildare is very upset by this.
- Near the end of Man on the Moon, a dying Andy Kaufman goes to Mexico to visit a "psychic surgeon" who claims to be able to remove cancers by laying on of hands, with blood and guts oozing out of his hands as evidence that he's really doing something. When Andy spots the chicken guts the guy has palmed, he starts laughing.
- The Miracle Woman: Florence Fallon is a "healer" who apparently heals people with disabilities and severe health issues. However, it's all a sham to con people out of their money; the supposedly "healed" patients are planted to make people believe these "miracles".
- The Man with the Golden Arm: Zosh, who is confined to a wheelchair due to a spinal injury suffered in a car crash, is visited by a ridiculous quack who hooks her up to an "electric blood reverser and spine manipulator." Actually justified in this instance, as Zosh is only pretending and actually can walk perfectly well.
- Pete's Dragon (1977): Dr. Terminus, who is also a traveling Snake Oil Salesman, never really displays any true medical credentials, but is constantly offering up hoax cures of every type imaginable. When he discovers the existence of the titular dragon, he becomes quite excited at the prospect of chopping up Elliot to make all kinds of elixirs and curatives to expand his business (and fortune).
Literature
- The Apothecary Diaries has a character who is referred to by this exact trope. As there aren't many skilled doctors willing to become eunuchs, he was the best doctor the Rear Palace could get.
- Discworld:
- Pyramids: The resident Doctor at the Assassins' Guild is presented as a quick-thinking bluffer who appears to have scammed his way into the job with very little actual knowledge of medicine. He does have an ability to think on his feet and, presented with a comatose patient, invents the theory that's all caused by tiny little organisms which are too small to see... "Walruses. Yea, that's right. Walruses. Walrus-borne infection, see?"
- Later Discworld novels show this is true of pretty much any Ankh-Morpork doctor, since like any true Ankh-Morporkian their main goal is simply keeping the patient alive long enough to get paid. The patient actually pulling through is just a detail, and deaths are dismissed as the will of the Gods, to the extent that when the Patrician gets poisoned Captain Vimes refuses to let an actual doctor treat him, and gets the city's best horse doctor to make a house call (since horses are a lot more monetarily valuable, especially to easily upset mob bosses).
- The Godfather: Dr. Taza spends more time in brothels than reading medical books and received his medical degree from the university of Palerma only because the local Mafia leader said so. Michael Corleone is understandably hesitant to have him operate his jaw broken by NYPD Captain Mark McCluskey.
- The Grace of Kings: The Immortality Seeker Emperor Mapidéré (based on Emperor Qin Shi Huang) drew a crowd of fraudulent and delusional healers who promised various Longevity Treatments for exorbitant sums. The quack medicine left him looking thirty years older than his age.
- One of the cases in The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency involves a general physician who sometimes seems to be a very good doctor, and sometimes acts like he has no idea what he's doing. The solution to the mystery is that the actual doctor and his identical twin brother (who definitely isn't a doctor) are running two doctor's offices in different cities, simultaneously—in order to make twice as much money. They switch between the offices at regular intervals, so at any visit there's a 50% chance you'll be seen by the quack instead.
- In The Sisters Grimm, Frau Pfefferkuchenhaus (the Gingerbread Witch) works as a dentist, and it seems that pulling the teeth out is the only treatment you can get at her office (although, thankfully, she is also aware of the existence of anaesthetics). When Sabrina tries to tell Puck one has to go to a medical school to become a dentist, Frau Pfefferkuchenhaus says "I didn't know that".
Live-Action TV
- CSI: NY: In "Wasted", a woman posing as a doctor uses unverified folk remedies to milk her patients of their life savings, and when all their money is gone, she accepts jewelry as payment. The wife of a man with a rare blood disease is finally driven over the edge after the leech treatments the "doctor" uses on the husband repeatedly fail to work, and shoots her in an alley.
- A Running Gag of Doctor Who is about The Doctor being confused with a real doctor, but sometimes he uses the confusion and becomes a quack.
- At one point in Michael Palin's travelogue Full Circle, Palin goes to visit a Philippine "psychic surgeon" who does the hand-squeezing thing. Palin is too polite to confront him but he clearly isn't impressed.
- Hawaii Five-O: In the two-parter "Once Upon a Time" McGarrett's sister is in thrall to a quack doctor who claims she can cure her baby, who has cancer. The child passes away long before the end of part one.
- Law & Order: The Episode "Seed" has a distraught woman shoot at her husband in a bank, for which a security drops her. The woman had been seeing a fertility doctor in hopes of achieving motherhood but was told she'd miscarried. After subpoenaing the doctor's records, detectives discover multiple patients receiving sperm from one particular donor, "AX-23," who is a carrier of the cystic fibrosis gene. Doc Delbert also has this gene, and a medical license, but not the ethics.
- Power Rangers Time Force: The Monster of the Week Medicon is a medical-themed mutant prisoner who is derided by Frax as being a quack.
Music
- "Weird Al" Yankovic: The song "Like a Surgeon" is from the point of view of a self-admitted quack surgeon who engages in various forms of medical malpractice. However, the main reason the A.M.A. considers him a disgrace isn't because all his patients end up dying, but because they're dying before they can pay.
Puppet Shows
- The Muppet Show: Played with. One recurring segment is "Veterinarian's Hospital", described by the announcer as "the continuing stoooooooory of a quack who's gone to the dogs". (The doctor is played by Rowlf.) It's not clear if Rowlf's character, Dr. Bob, really is a quack, but he's a terrible doctor regardless—he swaps jokes with the nurses (played by Janice and Miss Piggy) instead of making any real effort to heal his patients.
Radio
- In The Goon Show episode "The Call of the West", Bloodnok appears as a seller of 'thunder pills' in Dodge City. Having seen what they do to an unfortunate volunteer, the townspeople are quick to declare him a quack and chase him out of town.
Tabletop Games
- Dead of Winter: Anita Wallace has no fewer than three random events where she tells Blatant Lies about her old job. In one, she claims to have been an herbalist and offers to treat another survivor's injuries, worsening them if they accept.
- In Ironclaw good medicine adds a flat +1 to an injured or sick character's healing quota, quack medicine on the other hand allows a character to roll their Will dice as well as their Body when rolling to increase their healing quota, implying it's a placebo. It only costs half as much though.
- In Myriad Song characters with the Bad Medicine gift can remove most detrimental conditions with a successful check, but then the patient has to make a check to avoid getting sick or addicted to whatever questionably legal substances were administered.
- Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Good medical care is scarce, expensive, and often dangerous in the Old World, and any doctor has a chance to be a fraud or lunatic. They can stumble upon a real treatment, but it's equally likely that an apparently successful Heal skill test will fall apart after a few hours or days. Higher-paid doctors are actually more likely to be quacks — at least, until their first high-profile cock-up.
Theatre
- In L Elisir D Amore, Dr. Dulcamara claims to sell an all-curing medicine just for three lire. When Nemorino asks him if he also sells "Queen Isolde's love potion", Dulcamara, after a moment of confusion, quickly says yes and gives Nemorino a bottle of Bordeaux wine, claiming that it's the love elixir.
Video Games
- Webkinz: Subverted. Dr. Quack is an anthropomorphic duck doctor who is named after the phrase "quack doctor." Ironically, though, he seems to be perfectly legitimate and is shown to be very kind and caring.
Web Animation
- Homestar Runner: In the toon "Bug in Mouth Disease", Homestar swallows a bug and goes into a panic over it. He eventually asks Bubs if he is a doctor, which Bubs says yes upon finding a card that says Dr. Bubs note . After examining Homestar, he tells him he doesn't have a pancreas before offering to sell him one. Homestar is not amused.
Homestar: Bubs, are you an unethical quack?
Bubs: The most quackinest!
Western Animation
- Courage the Cowardly Dog: Le Quack, an anthropomorphic duck, is a con artist. In the episode "Dr. Le Quack, Amnesia Specialist" he poses as a doctor who uses unorthodox means to try and cure Muriel's amnesia. However, he's actually trying to get her to tell him where she keeps her valuables, so he can rob her.
- Zigzagged for Dr. Zoidberg the alien doctor from Futurama. He claims to be an expert on humans but is clearly not. However, he is not conning; he truly thinks he knows about human anatomy, but he doesn't. As for whether or not he's a real doctor, that varies. In one episode, he claims he lost his medical degree in a volcano but might have been lying. In another, it's revealed that he's Not That Kind of Doctor but another episode suggests that he's good at doctoring various species, just not humans.
- In The Hair Bear Bunch: in "The Bear Who Came to Dinner", Square Bear is faking an injury and is taking advantage of zookeeper Peevly's hospitality. Peevly calls for a doctor, and who he gets is zoo gorilla Bananas, with whom Hair Bear pulled an allnighter teaching him about medicine. Bananas introduces himself as Dr. Rudolph Von Faker: M.D., B.A., Ph.D and P.D.Q. When Bananas tests Square's reflexes and gets a kick in the stomach:
Dr. Von Faker!Bananas: There is evidence of definite scars und injuries.
Peevly: On the bear?
Dr. Von Faker!Bananas: (painfully) No...on the doctor! - Andre from Inside Job (2021) is already questionable in his professional ethics with his polysubstance abuse, but in the season one finale, it's revealed he flunked out of med school first year
- Looney Tunes: In "The Sneezin' Weasel" (1938), Willie the Weasel poses as a Dr. Quack (not the real one, who does appear later) to treat a chick with a cold and try to seize him as well as his siblings. Willie gives himself away when he sneezes and his disguise comes off.
- In "Hare Tonic," Bugs Bunny is disguised as Dr. Kilpatient as part of his plan to make Elmer think he has "rabbit-itis." He paints red and yellow spots in a room, grills Elmer on math ("Aha! Multiplyin'!") and that he even looks like a rabbit.
- Popeye: In the episode "The Medicine Man" from the 60's animated series, Bluto/Brutus plays the role of Doctor Quack. He deliberately sabotages Popeye's spinach medicines to get rid of a potential competitor and messes up his health with questionable treatments (scare therapy for hiccups, sneezing powder, sleeping pills, and, finally, a high-speed trip downhill on a wheelchair) For the Evulz. Eventually, Popeye lets him give a taste of his own medicine by applying Quack's scare therapy on the doctor himself: after accidentally drinking genuine spinach medicine, he immediately recovers from Quack's medicines, throws the latter onto an operating room table, and shows him a dozen surgical tools ready to be used. Quack freaks out and bursts out from his office at full speed with the whole operation table.
- The Real Ghostbusters: In "Something's Going Around", a ghost pretends to be a living doctor named Dr. McAtheter and sells the Ghostbusters potato chips that he claims are a health food. However, they actually give the Ghostbusters bizarre symptoms (such as random size changes, strange-coloured lesions, and levitation) whenever they're around ghosts so that the ghosts can cause chaos without being caught.
- Rocko's Modern Life: In the episode "Flu-In-U-Enza," Rocko gets a cold and goes to see a doctor. During the examination, Dr. Bendova asks him to bend over as he does a Glove Snap, and it cuts to the exam being done. Rocko seems quite traumatized by the whole ordeal, making it easy to fill in the blanks. Turns out that Bendova is not a doctor at all, and instead, is an escaped mental patient.
- Dr. Nick Riviera from The Simpsons is the doctor to go to if you are OK with having an unskilled practitioner in exchange for nominally lower costs. In "King Size Homer", Doctor Hibbert (who is competent most of the time) recommends him to Homer, on the grounds that he will help someone become morbidly obese while Hibbert can't in good conscience do it.
- SpongeBob SquarePants: The episode "Fear of a Krabby Patty" is about SpongeBob being forced to make Krabby Patties for non-stop for days on end without any sleep. Eventually, due to being sleep-deprived, he starts hallucinating and develops a fear of a Krabby Patty. Plankton tries to take advantage of this by disguising himself as a psychologist named Dr. Peter Lankton in order to try to get SpongeBob to tell him the Krabby Patty ingredients. After using hypnosis, SpongeBob falls asleep, which cures his fears. However, still trying to get the ingredients, Plankton claims otherwise.
- Star Trek: Lower Decks: Dr. Migleemo is a literal example of this as much as he is a figurative one. Besides being a bird-like species of alien, he has no actual knowledge of science or psychological practices, instead providing his services in the form of constant food puns that do nothing but annoy his patients. The Cerritos isn't exactly the Enterprise, but his level of incompetency is so bad that no one on the ship trusts him, and Season 4 reveals that Mariner's problems stemming from her PTSD of losing her friend Ensign Sito and fighting in the Dominion War only became compounded because she doesn't trust the only therapist she has access to. Really, it's a miracle that Migleemo hasn't been fired yet.
