- Health
No evidence that John D. Rockefeller suppressed “natural healing” or had practitioners arrested and jailed
Key takeaway
Alternative medicine practices, like naturopathy, continue to be practiced by many people today. Medical research has drawn on both petrochemicals and materials from nature, like plants. For example, the anti-cancer drug paclitaxel originates from the bark of the Pacific yew tree. Another example is artemisinin, extracted from the annual mugwort, which is used to treat malaria. Aspirin, a common pain reliever, originates from willow bark.
Reviewed content
Verdict:
Claim:
Rockefeller suppressed “natural healing modalities” to profit from petroleum-based medicine, had natural medicine practitioners arrested and jailed
Verdict detail
Unsupported: No evidence is provided for the claim that Rockefeller orchestrated the discrediting of “natural healing modalities” or that he had natural medicine practitioners jailed.
Factually inaccurate: The claim that “natural” medicine has been suppressed in favor of "patentable" petroleum-based medicine is untrue. While petrochemicals are used to make many drugs, patentable medicines have also been developed based on natural materials like plants. Some examples are aspirin, paclitaxel, and artemisinin.
Full Claim
Oil mogul John D. Rockefeller suppressed “natural healing modalities” to profit from selling petroleum-based medicine, had natural medicine practitioners arrested and jailed; Rockefeller founded the American Cancer Society to suppress information that petroleum-based medicine was causing cancer
Review
In November 2024, a video went viral on Facebook claiming that industrialist John D. Rockefeller suppressed “natural healing modalities” in order to profit from selling petroleum-based medicine and had practitioners of “natural” medicine arrested and jailed. The video has been viewed more than 117,000 times to date.
Conspiracy theories that alternative medicine and its practitioners are being suppressed aren’t new. Fact-checking groups like Snopes and Lead Stories debunked related claims.
The original video, as the watermark indicates, comes from the TikTok account @questionantiquity, run by a user who claims to be a “theoretical historian”. The account has more than 122,000 followers. Question Antiquity also posted the video to its Facebook account in May 2023.
Question Antiquity’s TikTok account also posted numerous videos promoting various conspiracy theories, such as one alluding to the baseless claim that 9/11 was an inside job because of the way World Trade Center Building 7 collapsed; another implied that sources of free energy are being suppressed.
Its Rockefeller video similarly made a series of baseless claims implying that alternative medicine was unfairly suppressed so that Rockefeller could profit from patentable, petroleum-based pharmaceuticals. We explain below.
No evidence that Rockefeller orchestrated discrediting of “natural healing”
John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (1839-1937) was an American industrialist and philanthropist. He founded the Standard Oil Company and is widely considered to be the richest American in history. Like George Soros and Bill Gates, his wealth and connections have made him a popular figure in conspiracy theories invoking a secret group of “elites” who want to control the world.
The claim that Rockefeller pressured Congress to “declare natural healing” as “unscientific quackery” is unsubstantiated by evidence. We were unable to find any record of Rockefeller doing so, nor did the video provide evidence for its claim.
This claim, along with the claim that Rockefeller ordered his propagandists to label natural medicines “used for thousands of years” as “alternative”, suggests that the video was actually taking aim at the Flexner Report, which has become a lightning rod of homeopaths and naturopaths. The report has some connections to Rockefeller, although not in the way that the video claimed, as we will explain later.
The Flexner Report, or to call it by its formal title “Medical Education in the United States and Canada”, was published in 1910. It was written by Abraham Flexner, a former school teacher who specialized in educational practices. Flexner was commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation to survey medical schools in the U.S. and Canada, with a view to improving the quality of medical education, due to his expertise in pedagogy.
Flexner traveled across North America to visit medical schools and record his observations. He found that the quality of medical schools at that time was highly variable and the majority of schools were poorly run. Flexner wrote that many medical schools sprung up quickly in the 1800s, but they were primarily viewed as a money-making scheme, with little regard for the quality of education that students received. From page 7 of the report:
“A hall could be cheaply rented and rude benches were inexpensive […] Occasional dissections in time supplied a skeleton—in whole or in part—and a box of odd bones. Other equipment there was practically none. The teaching was, except for a little anatomy, wholly didactic. The schools were essentially private ventures, money-making in spirit and object. A school that began in October would graduate a class the next spring; it mattered not that the course of study was two or three years”.
In a bid to attract students and thus generate more revenue, the standards for admission at many schools were low. Flexner found that only a minority of medical schools required two years of college preparation; the rest only called for a high school diploma or “the rudiments or recollection of common school education”. After completing his survey, which took one and a half years, he classified medical schools into three categories.
Sixteen were considered to be comparable to Johns Hopkins Medical School, which Flexner used as the gold standard; 50 were considered to be capable of meeting the same standard provided that improvements were made. The rest, however, were so deficient that he recommended they be shut down, writing that “the law, if enforced, would stamp them out”.
As this article from the McGill Office for Science and Society points out, Chapter 10 of the Flexner Report strongly criticized “medical sects”, described by the article as “competing philosophies of medicine, like homeopathy, osteopathy, and eclectic medicine”. In that chapter, Flexner called out the poor quality of laboratories at many sectarian schools and the lack of clinical opportunities afforded to students to learn.
Following the publication of his report, many such schools closed down.
The video’s claim that it was Rockefeller who had been behind the discrediting of “natural healing” may have to do with the fact that Flexner was also secretary of the General Education Board, created with the help of donations from Rockefeller. However, there’s no evidence that Rockefeller dictated the contents of the report or orchestrated the school closures that followed its publication.
The video’s claim that “[d]octors and professors who objected to Rockefeller’s plan […] who dared to speak out were arrested and jailed” is unsubstantiated by evidence.
Lynn Miller, a professor emerita of the School of Business at La Salle University who studied the effects of medical school closures post-Flexner, told fact-checking group Lead Stories:
“The history of medicine certainly includes reports of arrests of scoundrels who sold medical diplomas or adulterated medicines, or made wildly fraudulent claims about the myriad illnesses that their patent medicine would cure. But in my study of the history of medicine and medical education, I have never come across stories of physicians being stripped of licenses or arrested for merely speaking out against Rockefeller, the AMA, or anyone else regarding the direction that medicine should take.”
Both petrochemicals and plants play important role in developing medicines
The video implied that “natural healing modalities” were deliberately suppressed and replaced by “patentable” petroleum-based medicines because Rockefeller would profit from this.
However, this is inaccurate. Many “natural healing modalities” or alternative medicine as we call it today, like chiropractic and homeopathy, remain alive and well. In fact, some alternative medicine practices, like yoga and taichi, are integrated into cancer treatment. Such practices aim to help cancer patients cope with the side effects of conventional cancer treatment and to relieve worry and stress.
In addition, research on materials from nature, like plants, has yielded many clinically useful medicines that are patentable. For example, paclitaxel or Taxol, an anti-cancer drug, originates from the bark of the Pacific yew tree. Another example is artemisinin, extracted from the annual mugwort (Artemisia annua), which is used to treat malaria. Aspirin, a common pain reliever, originates from willow bark. And morphine was first obtained from poppy seeds.
Finally, the video provided no evidence to back up its claim that “petroleum-based medicines were causing cancer”. Its claim that Rockefeller founded the American Cancer Society (ACS) to suppress this information is likewise unsubstantiated.
The ACS states that it was founded in 1913 by 10 doctors and five laypeople in New York City. Rockefeller’s name isn’t mentioned, although his son, John Rockefeller Jr., did donate initial funds to the American Society for the Control of Cancer, which would later become the ACS. If Rockefeller was indeed involved in founding the society, it’s likely he would have been mentioned among its founders, given his stature in American history.
Conclusion
The Facebook video made a series of bold but unfounded claims that Rockefeller unfairly suppressed “natural healing” in favor of petroleum-based pharmaceuticals. As explained in our review, various clues in the video indicate that the claims are likely taking aim at the Flexner Report, published in 1910.
The report heavily criticized the sectarian medical schools of its time for their poor quality of education. Many of these schools closed in the wake of the report’s publication. This has led some practitioners of alternative medicine to claim this as evidence that they are being suppressed.
However, the practice of various forms of alternative medicine, like chiropractic, homeopathy, and naturopathy, remain alive and well today. Several have also been integrated into mainstream medicine. While petrochemicals are involved in making many medicines, researchers also study materials from the natural world, like plants, in order to develop new medicines.
