I was staying up way too late and I just saw this long infomercial about a man named Kevin Trudeau plugging his book, “Natural Cures They Don’t Want You To Know About.” He made some quite startling claims. I could see how this could be put into GD, but I think GQ mostly applies.
Here are some of his claims…which of course you can find in his book! Only 29.95 + S&H! I’m sure I’m not the only one that saw this.
The FDA says that anything that cures/diagonoses/prevents a disease is a drug. Thus, anyone that claims to cure/prevent disease has a drug and must have a license and have their product approved, otherwise the FDA will sue/crack down on them and whatnot. The FDA tried to make things like calcium and vitamin C/E a drug.
The FDA and related drug companies sue people that attempt to show that herbs, natural vitamins, and minerals can be as or more effective than popular or marketed drugs.
Food companies put drugs in our food to specifically make us hungry and addicted. He kept saying how the chemicals make us hungry the more we eat which leads to a vicious cycle.
Other countries do not accept many of our food exports because of all the chemicals and poisons in them (and he wasn’t talking about the recent U.S. beef scare; he was making a very broad generalization).
There are natural and well known cures for herpes, diabetes, and pain, including arthritis, that the companies don’t want you to know about. Somehow no one seems to know about these and just keep buying drugs. He made a point to say that there are things you can rub on your skin that will do away with arthritic pain forever.
I had the hardest time swallowing this one: It’s impossible (or very hard) to become sick or get cancer if your “body’s pH” is basic. Everyone that has cancer has an “acidic pH.”
He mostly sounded like a snake-oil salesman to me. The only thing he kept saying that I agreed with is that drug companies don’t want people to be cured and that food companies want people to be addicted and fat. There may be kernels of truth in his other claims, but I’d be surprised for many of them.
I love to see BSers put in their place, so have at it Dopers!
Besides the fact that Trudeau is a known fraudster, as pointed out in the cites provided by Roches, these specific claims fall into two categories: “so what,” and “yeah, right.”
The FDA insists that, if you’re going to claim that what you’re selling cures or prevents a disease, you have to be able to prove it. You can’t just make claims without anything to back it up. This is a good thing, not a bad one.
The FDA isn’t stopping people from “showing” that herbs, etc., are more effective than standard drugs. They just want those people to be able to prove it. And actually, “supplements” like herbs, vitamins, and minerals, enjoy a fairly broad exemption from FDA control, thanks to Sen. Orrin Hatch. Read about it here.
Yeah, and they have satellites that broadcast energy pulses that go directly into our brains and make us want tortilla chips. Right.
AFAIK, the only U.S. food products that are having any problems overseas are the ones that contain genetically modified food products. Whether these actually represent some sort of danger, or whether other countries are simply panicking out of ignorance, is the subject of much debate.
Whenever you hear a pitchman telling you about “secret knowledge” that’s purposely being kept from people, make sure you have a firm grip on your wallet.
There’s absolutely no proof of this whatsoever. Zero. Zilch. Nada.
Why would drug companies want people to not be cured? Are you talking about the claims that we have all these cures for stuff like cancer, AIDS, etc. hidden away and aren’t releasing them so as to make money off the meds that only treat symptoms? That doesn’t make sense once you realize that we’ve essentially cured/prevented various diseases that used to be killers but now are exceedingly rare. For instance: polio used to cripple many, syphilis used to kill, (deadly) smallpox was once sadly too common. Tuberculosis is fairly rare in the US now. We’ve found ways to prevent or at least cure those diseases.
Besides, why wouldn’t a drug company love these “natural cures”? A good number of our medications are derived from natural sources. Aspirin was developed by researching willow bark, and making the natural chemical extracted from it into a version that’s easier on the stomach. Digoxin (aka Lanoxin) came from digitalis, derived from foxglove plants. Tamoxifen, a treatment for breast cancer, was developed from a plant-derived chemical.
And I don’t believe that people won’t buy the medication if you can get it from food. People gulp down vitamin supplements when eating healthier could get them all the vitamins and minerals they need. They take fiber in pill or powder, proteins from powders, and take pills to try to interfere with the food they do eat!
Actually, growth hormones are banned in the EU and as a consequence american beef, for instance, can’t be imported, since the meat is generally hormoned.
Genetically modified foodstuff should be allowed soon, providing it’s labelled as such.
I assume that there might be some other less well known US foods that can’t be sold in the EU (or elsewhere) due to other differences in regulations. So this particular statement is probably easy to back up.
No, I don’t believe there’s an active conspiracey, that would be pretty ludicrous. But if there was something that totally cured some of the terminal diseases that require lifetime treatments, especially if it was cheap, I don’t think it would be a stretch to imagine the companies would lose a lot of their heretofore expected earnings.
Roches: Quackwatch looks like a nice site, thanks. I knew there was something up with that guy.
All the statements about K.T. being a fraud scum are true. I bought his “Mega Memory” ten years ago… Older but wiser now. BUT:
I’m sad to say that I worked for a drug company in Japan in which at least two people in upper management presented me with this very logic. I was doing an analysis for a new diagnostic test (in development); my advice was to do a feasability study. They wanted me to prove that marketing the product would bring in more revenue than it would decrease revenue from their current lineup of drugs (in certain cases doctors would prescribe a med that maybe they wouldn’t prescribe if the test told them it was unnecessary).
I was extremely disillusioned by this reasoning. They were not scary, hard-line about it; just passive, shitty, and very cynical about it. I hate to break the bad news, but sometimes big business acts precisely as stereotypes would indicate.
The natural cures will not be patentable unless the drug company introduces a new process to create, or delivery system to deliver, etc., the compound. So a drug company will not “love” a natural cure in the sense that they are not going to be willing to spend big dinero on research only to have every other company simply manufacture the compound once it gets FDA approval for a certain application.
Nor would a drug company want to see a cheap drug eat up its market share.
Ah, but they also have to fear that someone else will develop a similar test independently, and then they lose twice, on the marketing for the test and on their medications. Competition will help reduce some of these instances. I work at a hospital, and one of the studies I’m working on is sponsored by a pharmaceutical company; if this particular item works, it will reduce the need for medications made by a different company.
Only if their products are very narrowly focused. If cancer were cured tomorrow, it would still be the case that everyone dies eventually, usually from some serious medical condition requiring a myriad of medications. And, other things being equal, the longer people live, the more prescription meds they’ll use in their lifetimes. So unless a company made only chemo drugs or something, their expectations for profit should actually increase with a cheap cure for cancer, though obviously some drug lines would become worthless.
Well, it isn’t the FDA that says this, Congress did in the Food Drug and Cosmetic Act (21 USC). It is illegal to market a new drug in interstate commerce for which there does not exist a New Drug Approval (NDA). The FDA has statutory authority (again, from the law passed by Congress) to enjoin or prosecute firms that attempt to market new drugs that lack NDA’s. I don’t think vitamins have ever been considered new drugs under the Food Drug and Cosmetic Act. Mainly because they were taken for nutritional reasons, which would make them foods under the Act. And, as stated above thanks to Orin Hatch and the passing of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, as long as the manufacturers of vitamins and minerals don’t make any disease claims, the law won’t consider them drugs (or new drugs).
Um, nope. FDA would love it if some of these dietary supplement people would show us substantiation of their claims. But, thanks to DSHEA, they don’t have to, as long as they stick to “structure/function” claims and away from disease claims. If they make disease claims they’ll have to show FDA proof of these claims (and proof that their product is safe and proof that it is sufficiently effective to justify whatever risk it may pose) just like any other drug manufacturer.
Hmmm. If they’re “well known” already, those companies are a bit late, aren’t they? I figure you gotta be a crook to make such a claim, and stupid to believe it.
Except that it wouldn’t be cheap. Simple supply and demand here: Some company would be the first to make it, so for a while, they’d be the sole supplier. Given how difficult drug research is, it could be years before another company could produce it, even absent a patent. And if this stuff actually cured a major disease which would otherwise require a lifetime of treatment, then demand for it would be astronomical. Low supply and high demand is a guaranteed recipe for high price.
From my own personal experience, I am developing serious doubts about the North American medical and pharmaceutical system. I spent 13 years taking antidepressants for anxiety; not once in 13 years was it suggested that I could recover from anxiety and be drug-free. I am currently going to a support group that has at least 3 people that I have personally spoken to that consider themselves recovered from anxiety, for multiple years. In their own words, they consider themselves cured.
To make this issue even more interesting, the standard treatment for anxiety disorders, SSRIs and anti-depressants, apparently are not as innocuous as the medical and pharmaceutical communities market them to be. There are stories emerging about these drugs being dangerous and possibly addictive; the anti-depressant I took for years, Serzone, is not available in Canada any longer due to it causing serious liver damage. From this site:
I’m not saying doctors and drug companies are all part of a huge conspiracy to keep people sick and unhappy instead of trying to cure them, and therefore reducing large sources of income. It wouldn’t surprise me if they were, though.
Let me clarify that last paragraph a little; I don’t think most doctors are part of a conspiracy. I think most doctors are sincerely trying to help their patients, but their hands are tied by “best practice” procedures, and the risk of lawsuits if they don’t prescribe drugs as required by best practice procedures.
I would say the FDA slows the process of public access to all the drugs available thats expected for obvious reasons.But depending on what natural substance it is,some human bodies react differently to different things we put in or on our bodies,depending on your chemical and biological make-up.Some people are allergic to a substance,some are not,and or react and process these chemicals,molecules,what-ever.Would’nt surprise me though,that there are many cures just lying in a closed vault some where,that could disrupt the whole process of the pharmacutical money making world,and or medicine world in general.Kinda like that warehouse they showed at the end of the Indiana Jones movie,filled with crates and boxes filled with who knows what,stamped top secret.Gives ya something to think about?
Well, thank God those countries don’t let in all that poisoned U.S. products. You can tell their policies are working because all those countries are without any disease whatsoever and they’re living to 150! :rolleyes:
=====
I wouldn’t blame the pharmaceutical companies, but the doctors and psychiatrists are too quick to prescribe for mental disorders without any plan for attempting to cure the disorder. They rely too quickly and too heavily on a drug to control symptoms without any further follow-up or without a plan to eventually wean the patient off the drugs.
The problem is that doctors aren’t psychiatrists or psychologists… they shouldn’t be prescribing mental disorder drugs in the first place.
Psychiatrists, who should know better, coming from a background in psychoanalytic talk therapy, are becoming simply psychotropic drug dispensers. I can’t count the number of times I’ve talked to someone on mental disorder medication and asked them about when and under what conditions their psychiatrist was going to start reducing and taking them off medication. Their response: “we never talked about that.” :eek: :eek: :smack:
And so, what happens, is that the person taking the mental disorder medication decides, “I’m cured” (which they’re most likely not) or “I can’t take the side effects anymore” and they stop taking the medication. Which, of course, ends in disaster.
Lesson: If you’re on a mental disorder medication (or think you should be), see a psychiatrist (and not a general medical doctor) who is willing to discuss how long the medication needs to be taken and under what parameters should the medication start to be discontinued.
Excellent points, moriah. I would also add that in addition to seeing a psychiatrist for prescriptions for antidepressants, etc, you should discuss therapy options with her as well, to work on the causes of why you’re feeling anxious and/or depressed. Cognitive therapy is, I believe, becoming the treatment of choice for anxiety disorders.
If there were cheap, simple, reliable cures for serious diseases, the pharmaceutical companies would be all over it, and would apply their massive marketing machines to attempt to acquire the leading market share in the sales of these miracle cures, as opposed to funding hugely expensive research on synthetic drugs, for example.
The pharmaceutical companies don’t touch them because, by and large, they don’t work (at least nowhere near as spectacularly as is sometimes claimed).
The problem is, though, that even if a super cheap compound were found to be that miracle cure, they’d still have to spend millions on testing to “prove” it works and is safe. As a result, there are no cheap new drugs on the market. Toss in the fact that most natural remedies would be unpatentable, and you’ll never get the pharmaceutical companies interested.