Words Fail Me, Again

There are some stories you encounter on the Internet that will make you wonder if somebody is trolling you, or possibly whoever wrote the article. There are others that will make you want to trace back the source of the information and verify that the article isn’t just made-up misinformation. Earlier today I was trying to authenticate the claim that former Vice President Dick Cheney had joined filmmaker Michael Moore and the Pope in opposing the Muslim immigration ban (which turned out to be true, by the way) when I stumbled onto a notice about a California-based homeopathic company that was being investigated by the FDA for including an unsafe (possibly toxic) level of deadly nightshade in a teething tablet product. Unable to believe my eyes, I went looking for the origin of the story…

Unfortunately, it would appear that this one is a true story. You can find the press release on the FDA website if you don’t believe me, and I can’t say I would blame you if you didn’t. The idea that a company could willfully endanger the lives of teething infants by using an ingredient whose effects the Food and Drug Administration calls “unpredictable” in children under two years old, and has denounced as an unacceptable risk is almost literally unbelievable – unless you are already familiar with homeopathic remedies. Most of these products involve trace amounts (they’re sometimes called “memories”) of various substances, which are supposed to work by triggering the body’s defenses without actually containing enough of the toxin to be dangerous. At least, that’s the idea…

As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, I have no training in either biology or chemistry, but the people who do research these subjects, including the top people at the Food and Drug Administration, have been almost unanimous in debunking homeopathic products as “pseudoscience” – later-day descendants of the “snake oil” products of the Wild West era. An MD of my acquaintance once described a homeopathic iron supplement as containing roughly the same amount of iron you would ingest if you drank tap water in a building with iron pipes – which is to say, less than you would get from food that was cooked in an iron skillet. Fortunately, these miniscule concentrations usually keep homeopathic remedies from having any harmful effects on the user, since even if you are taking a product made with belladonna (deadly nightshade) there won’t be enough of it in an entire package to actually harm you. Unless, of course, you are under the age of two, with organs and systems that are still developing…

Now, we should probably acknowledge that, for the most part, homeopathic products aren’t illegal. As long as everything in the package is clearly labeled, and the appropriate disclaimers about the contents not being approved for treatment of anything by the FDA are in place, there’s generally no law against ingesting a “mineral supplement” that has less of that specific mineral in it than is normally found in the air you breathe. The problem in this case is that the amounts of belladonna found in the product are not consistent, and neither is effect of this ingredient on young children. The FDA is announcing that at this time they are not aware of any proven health benefit offered by these products, but there have been cases of serious negative reactions, possibly including death, among users in the affected age groups…

I’m not sure how this story will eventually shake out. At the moment, the FDA doesn’t even have enough evidence of wrongdoing to force the manufacturing company to recall the product, and so far the company has not agreed to a voluntary recall. Given the current administration in Washington, it does not seem likely that we will be seeing any more restrictions on highly lucrative products that may possibly have extremely bad side effects, either. For the moment, the best solution I can suggest is to research all unsupported product claims, consult with actual biomedical scientists, and don’t believe everything you read about the magical curative properties of very tiny amounts of deadly poison…