NanoViricides Inc. (NNVC)

[Rawnoc]

Snake oil is an expression that originally referred to fraudulent health products or unproven medicine but has come to refer to any product with questionable or unverifiable quality or benefit. By extension, a snake oil salesman is someone who knowingly sells fraudulent goods or who is himself or herself a fraud, quack, charlatan, or the like.

One source, William S. Haubrich in his book Medical Meanings (1997, American College of Physicians) mentions the hypothesis that the name came from the eastern United States. The indigenous people of the New York and Pennsylvania region would rub cuts and scrapes with the petroleum collected from oil seeps that occurred naturally in the area. European settlers observed this habit, and began bottling and selling the substance as a cure-all. The preparation was sold as "Seneca oil" in mid-nineteenth century, after the local tribes. Through mispronunciation this became "Sen-ake-a oil" and eventually "snake oil".[1] As Haubrich comments, "This story is almost too good to be true – which means it probably isn’t."