Healthy Skepticism Library item: 19496

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

O'Donoghue N
Pharmacies face advertising investigations
Pharmacy News 2011 Apr 19
http://www.pharmacynews.com.au/news/pharmacies-face-advertising-investigations

Full text:

Pharmacies will be monitored periodi- cally by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) following complaints over misleading advertising claims for products.
In a letter, seen by Pharmacy News, the ACCC said it would use the powers available to it to stop campaigns making unsubstantiated claims about products that claimed to improve balance, flexibility and strength through holograms embedded in silicon bands and necklaces. The ACCC was responding to complaints made by leading public health advocate, Dr Ken Harvey, from Latrobe Unviersity.
Dr Harvey sent complaints to the TGA on 17 November, 2010, about the sale and promotion of Hotband Holographic Technology Silicone Wrist Bands on the BodyAssist, Phar- macy Online and Chemist Warehouse websites, and again on 8 March 2011, about similar i.balance products.
The ACCC said it had taken action against Power Balance Australia Pty Ltd, which sells similar products. It had also contacted the manufacturers
of Hotbands and would be contacting the producers of the i.balance products to withdraw their advertising.
“The Commission will continue to periodically monitor claims made by distributors and retailers of these and
similar products to ensure compliance with the Competition and Consumer Act 2010.
“The Commission takes these matters very seriously and has a range of powers available to it if it considers
there has been a breach of the Act, including issue infringement notices and taking companies to court seeking pecuniary penalties,” the ACCC said.

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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