There was a brief period in the mid-1990's when the old-timey apothecary and snake-oil salesman were viable, if easy and inoffensive, sources of humor. After all, when you strip away the lethal body horror of consuming accidental poisons brewed in the salesman's bathtub, all that's left is the inherent absurdity of buying cure-all tonics from the polar opposite of a credible source. But that quasi-meme up and disappeared by the end of the decade and now it's conspicuously absent from our culture's comedy repertoire. Why is that? Perhaps it's because the basement elixir alchemist has at long last found a new home in that latest, greatest refuge for petty criminals and undiagnosed insane- the Internet. The preferred products of the day are cosmetic rather than strictly medical. Instead of searching for miracle cures for polio or alcoholism, modern idiots scour the Internet for teeth whitening products and weight loss pills. Observe, CT-BURN, a contemporary roadside medicine.

If cartoon parodies and vintage ad posters are to be believed, the snake-oil salesmen of the late 19th and early 20th centuries marketed their products with what passed for buzz words at the time. Apparently promising improved vitality and agreeable bowels was all it took to make folk drink a foul brew of turpentine, whiskey and colloidal radium. Today the buzz words have gotten a bit more sophisticated and the ingredients a bit less overtly deadly, but the wanton bullshit is still the same.

In the case of CT-BURN it's just a matter of throwing together every fake fitness substance devised over the past two decades and hoping that their horror movie metaphors for weight loss don't scare away more people than they convince to buy their pills. CT-BURN is supposedly a magic tincture consisting of Hoodia plants, guarana extract and an organic upper called Cha de Bugre. I was hoping that every active ingredient in this product had some kind of noble savage name, but alas they round out the recipe with yet-to-be-banned L-Theanine, which sounds a lot like generic Ritalin.

Unless you're too busy trying to cleanse your mind of images like your body fat slowly heating up and melting away inside your own gut, you'll probably notice that CT-BURN gets a little extra marketing oomph from obliquely referencing illegal drugs that its ingredients are a lot like, but better than. Even though most of the PR from the past ten years about Ephedra and Phenfen has revolved around how those substances put holes in your heart and lead to systemic organ failure, the folks behind CT-BURN know that there are enough desperate people out there that they'll gladly buy the pre-trial version of those drugs from South America just so they can avoid fifteen minutes of daily exercise.

Amount of Time Likely to be Wasted: Eh, not much. The site isn't all that entertaining and it doesn't even have any ludicrous pictures. Five minutes, tops.

Likelihood to Result in Arrest in Real Life: Likely. Sooner or later the FDA is going to get around to doing proper medical trials for miracle plants like Hoodia and discover that weight loss companies have been poisoning people for years. Until then, CT-BURN and product lines like it will continue to make freaky pill-fiends out of future Scientologists.

MCDR: Eat a freaking carrot and do some jumping jacks.

Internet Depth by Preposition: In. Just like overt scams, bogus medical sites aim to make real-world money but are too dubious to function outside the Internet.