Nobody likes pseudoscience, least of all those of us in the drugs market, who have to compete against homeopathic medicines. Those remedies, while completely useless, are vastly superior to conventional medicines on one front: they do not have to be confirmed by the FDA and similar authorities. Pretty much any charlatan out there can decide to release to the market a new homeopathic remedy, and if the packaging is colorful enough it’ll be sold by the hundreds of thousands.

Obviously, this approach hurts both the consumer (who doesn’t know whether or not to believe the advertisement on the packaging) and the drugs companies’ pockets. And while none of us likes the big capitalistic bosses of those companies, swaggering along with their Cuban smokin’ cigars, the harsh truth is that if they lose money on a certain drug, then they have to raise the cost of other drugs – and that injures our pockets all around.

That’s why I was glad reading today in Calcalist that a man sued the company ‘Taam Teva-Altman’ for allegedly advertising a certain mixture of vitamins as a baldness-stopper. The complainant has suffered from baldness since he was forty, and has used Roots HS for half a year. According to Calcalist, he has received false promises that the drug will stop the hair drop, although the efficiency was never proven in scientific tests.

Taam Teva-Altman hasn’t responded yet to this claim, so there isn’t much I can say about the issue without judging them ahead of time. However, if they are guilty as charged, then I very much hope that the complainant will receive the vast sum of money he has asked for: 67 million NIS on behalf of all the people who were injured by the fraud, and 30 million more just for the grief caused. Maybe this level of compensation will lead to more inhibited advertising by companies that sell pseudo-scientific products, to the betterment of us all.

Source: Calcalist

Taam Teva-Altman’s site

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The placebo effect is one of the most confounding aspects of every medical drug. When I’m taking this paracetamol – is it the drug doing the work, or is my brain fooling me? Both, most probably. But how much of each? And can we design drugs that will make smart use of the placebo effect?

Well, such drugs exist already, as homeopathic remedies which contain nothing but sugar. No question there about the source of the effect, then. It’s not such a bad idea, until you remember that those remedies cost a lot of money, and encourage people to ignore or delay conventional medical treatment… and usually the conventional medicine has better ways of dealing with most situations than the homeopathic placebo effect. So the question remains: why not combine the placebo effect with conventional medicine? It turns out that’s exactly what a group of researchers from the University of Rochester School of Medicine & Dentistry has done.

The Researchers used the placebo effect to successfully treat psoriasis patients with one quarter to one half of their usual dose of a widely used steroid medication, according to an early study published online today in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine. Early results in human patients suggest that the new technique could improve treatment for several chronic diseases that involve mental state or the immune system, including asthma, multiple sclerosis and chronic pain.

“Our study provides evidence that the placebo effect can make possible the treatment of psoriasis with an amount of drug that should be too small to work,” said Robert Ader, Ph.D., M.D. (hc), professor of Psychiatry and principal investigator of the study.

While that is all good and well, I’m bothered by the fact that Ader and his team chose to use psoriasis patients as a model for their research. Psoriasis is known to have a strong dependency on the state of stress of the patient, and so it is highly susceptible to his or her state of mind. Should this be qualified as placebo? I’m not so sure. Perhaps it is the intrinsic nature of the disorder that causes the effects. All the same, the idea behind the research should be applauded, and it’s good to hear that further studies are underway to confirm the effect and explore similar effects in other disorders.

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The entire paper (requires registration)

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Unfortunately, there is that uncomfortable nagging feeling called conciousness. Or maybe it’s just the Law, forbidding us biotechies to sell medicines that didn’t go through that long and hard road of clinical trials. But if you want to see how the common hospital would’ve been run under homeopathic residency, the below Youtube video should give ample example.

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