Cellular Telephone components. I told the customer that the part my boss was trying to sell them wasn’t particularly suitable for their application, but one made by a different product line would work better. Oh well, I never really liked that job anyway.
But Kosher is a well defined term. The court can judge the facts whether the goods provided met the description that was promised by the seller, without straying into giving religious.opinions.
If I advertise meat as kosher meat, butchered by the finest humane shochet, but you can prove I just brought it from Walmart, that’s something I can sue you for
Similarly in the OP if Zicam are advertising their product as homeopathic but not doing any of things involved in making homeopathic “medicine” (which are bullshit but a well defined set of bullshit steps) then they could get sued
in this case, water took Wood.
Homeopathic wood.
Oh. Ok
Gerson-type therapy is still claiming victims.
There’s a big monument to Hahnemann in Washington, DC. Once while out on a walk I rested in its shade. Waste of valuable urban space, thought I.
Hahnemann University Hospital in Center City Philly opened in 1848 as a homeopathic hospital (the Homeopathic Medical College of Pennsylvania) but soon shifted to mainstream medicine, becoming a respected teaching and research center. The South Tower was the first skyscraper teaching-hospital in the United States. After decades of top-tier service in everything from heart surgery to trauma care, it was brought down by bad management and closed its doors in 2019.
I think if you claim the meat was slaughtered according to kosher law when it just obviously wasn’t, that would be a tort. Where the courts won’t get involved is in deciding whether your shochet is actually obeying every detail of the law, and deciding disputes between rabbis about whether the knife may be made from some particular alloy and how large a nick has to be to disqualify the blade.
Which is why actual kosher Jews won’t just accept your assurances that the meat was butchered “by the finest shochet”; unless they know you personally and trust you, they’ll want to see a certificate to that effect signed by a rabbi that they trust.
If you just slapped the untrademarked word “kosher” on your package of Wal-Mart hamburger…kind of a gray area IMO. There are a great many Jews who keep kosher to the extent of not eating pork or shellfish, but who don’t care about the laws of slaughtering; indeed, I’m pretty sure that in America such Jews vastly outnumber the ones who are scrupulous about shechita. From the POV of such a Jew, any beef could be described as “kosher”, so the claim isn’t exactly false.
It doesn’t look like such lawsuits are super common, but here’s a cite to one such case:
January 2013: A federal judge dismissed a false advertising class-action lawsuit filed against ConAgra Foods. The complaint, which was originally filed in state court in 2012, claimed that the company deceptively marketed Hebrew National meat products as kosher when, in fact, they’re not. The judge ruled that the First Amendment bars the court from deciding religious matters. Specifically, the judge stated that “[t]je definition of the word ‘kosher’ is intrinsically religious in nature, and this court may not entertain a lawsuit that will require it to evaluate the veracity of defendant’s representations that its Hebrew National products meet any such religious standard.” (Wallace et al. v. ConAgra Foods, Inc., Case No. 12-cv-01354, D. Minn.)
They probably started out with sound business practices, but they got watered down over the years….
Yeah, they were probably fiscally solvent… right up until they succussed the books.
And that’s exactly analogous to the OP. If Zicam sell their product as homeopathic but just sell distilled water without doing any of the (admittedly bullshit) things that make something homeopathic, that’s something you could sue about.
I remembered this story. I also remembered that there was a thread, but not that I had started it.
What a crushing blow to turn on the news, and THIS happens.
Maybe. I’m not familiar with exactly how homeopaths convert ordinary water into magical healing water, so there’s probably something analogous. But I’m not sure how a court would rule if a homeopath claimed, with apparent sincerity, that his new, cheaper and simpler method was a breakthrough in homeopathic science which produces medicine just exactly as effective as the traditional methods do!
I did a fellowship there during my training. There were warning signs about its finances even back then.
One of the things I remember most is that its cafeteria operation (for staff and visitors) offered the best food I’ve ever encountered in a hospital setting. And there was a vendor offering fresh, soft hot pretzels at non-meal times. Those were the days…
Just remember that they are checked for purity but not for efficacy, unlike all other real drugs out there.
I never made it to Hahnemann, but I logged plenty of hours at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philly when I was involved in drug studies there (my sister ran the show). I always thought Jefferson had the best cafeteria food and ambiance in town—good enough that staff and visitors actually looked for excuses to be there.
Not quite true: plenty of “real” drugs get approved without ever proving they actually work, as long as they hit certain lab markers or surrogate endpoints. And the FDA doesn’t re-test efficacy once they’re on the market either. Purity gets checked; actual real-world effectiveness? Not so much.
While it’s not universal, many drugs and vaccines do get post-licensure testing and clinical studies of efficacy and safety, by agreement with or requirements of the FDA.
True, but the key word there is “many,” not “all.” Post-marketing studies are often negotiated, delayed for years, or quietly dropped, and the FDA rarely pulls a product just for failing to prove real-world benefit.