Body Enhancer’s benefits are Bogus

Fresh from a visit to Iraq, John Welch is ready to embark on a jihad against quackery…

The product Body Enhancer, marketed by the Zenith Corporation, costs $95 per bottle and is “claimed to assist fat burning, muscle growth and liver detoxification.” A judge, however, found that the product offered ‘bogus benefits’ although the couple behind the company remained defiant and claimed that they were “scapegoats for the natural remedy industry.”

Judge Lindsay Moore was reported as describing Lindsay Gallot as ‘calculatedly dishonest’ and accused his partner of making blatantly false claims. This is perfectly understandable criticism as Mr Gallot is described as an ex-geologist and his wife as an ex-physics teacher. One would be entitled to expect that two people with a scientific background would not get involved in such pseudo-scientific nonsense. In their defence the couple claim that the product was tested by a Maori health provider and their clinical advisor Dr Tane Taylor was quoted as saying “he understood the results were positive”. According to the NZ Medical Council website, Dr Taylor has a medical degree from Albania and I know from my time in Auckland that he was involved with a chelation clinic, and I think that ends any scientific credibility that he might lend to the subject. For a full report as published in the Sunday Star Times go to: www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3303250a10,00.html

The next website, www.zenith.co.nz/ComComm_Rebuttal07.html, describes some kind of pseudoscientific trial and then goes on to say that the results cannot be published on the web. Testimonials are called on in support, which is a hallmark of quackery. It is not a good business practice to test your own product and find that it is useless. Much better to rip off the punters who feel compelled after wasting $95 to give it an endorsement. However, one unusually sceptical ustomer described the product as “the most putrid stuff I’ve ever tried”. I bet that testimonial was never used!

Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat

Herman Goering obviously didn’t follow his own advice and now it seems remarkable that his huge frame ever fitted the cockpit of a World War One fighter aircraft where he was an acknowledged fighter ace. Morphine addiction must have addled his brains.

No such excuse for John Keitz who weighs 283kg and has been bedridden since August, 1998. He even cooks from his bed and this recipe gives some clue to his problem: six chicken breasts, a pound of butter……need I go on? John is now in receipt of disability benefits and can be cared for in a home funded by Medicare benefits of US$313 per day. This sort of grotesque celebration of excess is made all the worse by the excuses made by those people who specialise in medicalising human behaviour and the denial of personal responsibility. As Ivan Illich pointed out, the medical profession among others has always looked to extend its sphere of influence by “expropriating the power of the individual to heal himself.” This means that people exhibiting sick behaviour need to be allowed to suffer the consequences of such behaviour in order to make changes. Here, a parody of the American dream of ‘success’ is looked after in such a way that he can afford to buy even more chicken breasts and even more butter. At least he had the good sense not to bother with any of the useless products from the Zenith Corporation.

Dominion Post 2 July 2005

Something is rotten in the state of Sweden (and Denmark?)

Dr Elinder was a paediatrician in New Zealand and after returning to his native Sweden he criticised the tendency of his colleagues to over-diagnose such conditions as ADHD, minimal brain dysfunction and autism spectrum disorder, as well as the excessive use of Ritalin in treating such conditions. He was supported by a colleague, Dr Karve, who found serious flaws in the work done by a group led by a Professor Gilberg. In 1998, Dr Elinder asked to see Prof Gilberg’s research data but this request was refused and subsequently the data was destroyed with the connivance of the University of Gothenburg. This sort of disgraceful behaviour is the antithesis of science, which depends on independent verification and reproducibility. One tends to view the Scandinavians as somewhat placid and serious people but all that changed with the extraordinary attack on Bjorn Lomborg (The Skeptical Environmentalist) by the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty. Lomborg was cleared of any wrongdoing but I sincerely hope the DCSD is going to examine the behaviour of Prof Gilberg.
NZ Doctor 18 May 2005

Remunerative Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (RPTSD)

Is there anyone in New Zealand who has suffered some traumatic experience and not been diagnosed with PTSD? I can think of my late father who came back from the war, handed in his Thompson submachine gun, got on with his life and never spoke of the war again. Is there anybody else? I would like to hear from you.

A woman has been denied ACC compensation after having unprotected sex with a partner who concealed his HIV status from her. She has not contracted HIV but has been diagnosed with PTSD, or more properly called RPTSD because the motivation is to obtain money. I wonder whether the doctors or therapists who endorse this nonsense ever stop to think that they make themselves a laughing stock. I am reminded of the story told by Andrew Malleson (Need Your Doctor be so Useless) where a housing authority ignored people wanting better housing because all of them had the required letters of support from their doctors.

Another woman tried to get ACC cover because she was “retraumatised” while reliving a 20-year-old rape experience with a therapist. She alleged a ‘new injury’ on top of her existing PTSD. Why on earth somebody would either want or need therapy for something that happened 20 years ago is beyond me.

Perhaps I should ask Jeanette Wilson to contact my late father and see whether he wants to file a claim for PTSD from beyond the grave. I have never seen better examples of Welch’s Law, where claims expand to take up the amount of compensation available.

Pharmacists and alternative medicine

I went into my local pharmacy recently and was astonished to see that products that I would describe as ‘fringe’ medicines dominated the OTC medicine section. A full page infomercial in a local paper was clearly advertising one of these products but there is no acknowledgement that it is an advertisement. I wonder at the ethics of this. The same pharmacy had a similar article promoting ear candling and I hope the conference organisers are able to set up a demonstration of this bizarre practice.

One such pharmacy product is Esberritox. It contains various herbal products such as echinacea. A Google search produced 25,000 hits and echinacea is also well covered on www.quackwatch.com There is also a good article on that site by Dr Barrett about the unethical behaviour of pharmacists, which has them selling unproven remedies with a huge profit margin. It’s rather ironic that government policies to restrict pharmaceutical access to cheap and proven drugs has seen a parallel increase in the use of quack remedies as pharmacists stock them in order to maintain their incomes.

Acupuncture Flunks, not once but twice!

A German study found that sham acupuncture was just as effective as ‘real’ acupuncture for migraine headaches. The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. I did the same experiments over 15 years ago and satisfied myself that the needles could be stuck anywhere and the same results were obtained. It follows that acupuncture theory and training is a delusion and as I demonstrated at one of our meetings, an intelligent group of skeptics can become ‘trained acupuncturists’ after a one-hour lecture. It is a disgrace and a fraud that ACC continues to fund acupuncture as well as many other unproven treatments such as chiropractic and osteopathy. GPs are able to claim credits for acupuncture training. This should be stopped. It would be interesting to do a study of treating migraine with sham acupuncture versus therapeutic touch. I predict that such a study would show little or no difference in outcome because both treatments are placebos.

Christchurch Press 5 May 2005

This graph shows once again how sham acupuncture and ‘real’ acupuncture achieve the same results. In contrast, oestrogen replacement is very effective in reducing hot flushes in postmenopausal women. I will leave the last word to the editor of Bandolier: “when will alternative therapies really prove that they work? While we wait, will they stop fleecing people of huge amounts of cash for doing nothing?”

Methyl bromide and hysteria

Workers at Port Nelson are complaining that the gas methyl bromide is responsible for ill health and has caused the deaths of former workers from motor neurone disease. A local woman who lives 300m from the fumigation facility has demanded that the port company notify her of fumigation work so she can evacuate herself and her children. An investigation found that the more likely cause of the workers’ complaints was not methyl bromide but chemicals used in the preservation of timber. The deaths from motor neurone disease were due to an epidemiological effect known as clustering. One worker is described as having symptoms of “chronic fatigue, a persistent dry cough and lack of concentration.” These are typical symptoms of the fixed illness belief of ‘chemical poisoning’. Note that the symptoms are all subjective and therefore difficult to disprove. Staudenmayer (Environmental Illness: Myth and Reality) has shown conclusively that these symptoms are caused by personal psychological factors.

Christchurch Press 26 July 2004, 1 January 2005

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