Healthy Skepticism Library item: 15106

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

More weight loss worries
Pharmacy Daily (Australia) - registration required 2009 Feb 23
http://www.pharmacydaily.com.au

Full text:

PHARMACY weight loss systems are once again drawing attention, with the Weight Management Council Australia (WMCA) backing the recent CHOICE survey of the programs (PD 04 Feb) which raised concerns about the weight loss advice and support being provided to pharmacy customers.

“We are very concerned that consumers may be provided with unproven weight loss solutions, and incomplete advice that may not address the problem in a holistic and appropriately tailored manager,” said WMCA chairman Professor Gary Wittert.

He said the CHOICE report had found that “some diet plans sold in pharmacy, including shakes and
meal replacements, fail to deal effectively with the complex issues surrounding weight loss.

“A related and equally problematic issue is the promotion and sale of â€˜medications’ for weight loss that are not required to be subjected to evaluation by the TGA,” Wittert added.

The WMCA administers a code of practice for its members, which include Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, Fernwood, Trim-a-Weigh and Nestle Healthcare Nutrition.

Wittert said the code covers “all the minimum standards called for by CHOICE, but which the shakes
and meal replacements covered inthe CHOICE report, do not meet.”

He said the WMCA supported calls for regulation of the sector, but urged that “in the meantime
consumers should look for the WMCA accreditation symbol orcheck if an organisation is accredited before joining any weight loss plan.”

The Pharmacy Guild said criticism of pharmacy in the CHOICE report was unwarranted (PD 05 Feb) with president Kos Sclavos saying that community pharmacies “continue to be an ethical and accessible location for weight loss advice and programs.”

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909