/Culture/ Pills, Thrills and Bellyaches
04/07/2006 | Filed under Discover > Culture
If you’re worried about bird flu, stacks of sites will sell you the anti-flu medicine Tamiflu. It’s cheap, too: around £55 for 20 tablets. However, what the sites don’t tell you is that Tamiflu might not work.
Dr Nguyen Tuong Van of Hanoi’s Centre for Tropical Diseases has treated 41 bird flu victims with Tamiflu and describes it as ‘useless’, while the World Health Organisation (WHO) says the drug has not been ‘widely successful’. The Department of Health disagrees (as does Tamiflu’s manufacturer, Roche) but admits that if bird flu ever does strike we won’t be able to identify suitable drugs until we know the exact virus strain we’re fighting. Tamiflu might work, but it might not.
There’s another reason to be wary: like most drugs, Tamiflu has sideeffects so, for example, it can be bad news if you have dodgy kidneys or if you’re pregnant. It’s a similar story with the stop-smoking drug Zyban, which is also widely available online. Zyban should be avoided if you have a history of depression, alcohol problems or eating disorders. That’s why, like Tamiflu, it’s not suitable for everyone and is prescription only.
Drugs are dangerous enough when they’re real, but counterfeits are even scarier. Last year, a factory making fake drugs in Colombia was raided and 800,000 counterfeit tablets were seized. The factory was filthy and the drugs’ ingredients included brick dust, pesticide, floor wax and paint.
Thankfully, most fake drugs will have little or no adverse effect. However, they don’t tend to contain active ingredients either, which means they won’t work. If you’re taking life-saving drugs such as blood thinners or trying to ward off fatal diseases then fakes could, ironically, be lethal. According to the Daily Telegraph, some 100,000 Chinese die every year from taking fake drugs, and an estimated 200,000 people worldwide die each year from bogus anti-malarial drugs. WHO reports that more than ten per cent of the worldwide drug supply is fake.
Despite the dangers, it seems that we’re more worried about fake DVDs than fake drugs. Dr John Young, medical director of pharmaceutical firm Merck, Sharp and Dohme, reports: “Our own research into consumers’ online retail awareness threw up some startling results. Only two per cent of interviewees believed prescription-only medicines were likely to be counterfeit compared to more obvious consumer products such as DVDs, designer watches or luxury handbags.”
Buying drugs online is particularly daft if you live in the UK: the most you’ll pay for genuine pills is the prescription charge (£6.50) If you’re ordering online because you’re too embarrassed to speak to the doctor or because he or she won’t prescribe a treatment you reckon you need, you’re taking a very big risk. But health advice on the net doesn’t just stop at offering little white pills to ward off the latest global health scare.
Cancer chancers
The net is stuffed with sites offering quack remedies such as magic bracelets that claim to cure every conceivable disease or miracle drugs that guarantee to reverse the ageing process. Even more alarmingly, when Exeter University studied online cancer advice, researchers discovered that some sites recommended shark cartilage and various herbs instead of conventional treatment.
Such advice could kill you. As Professor Edzard Ernst, who chaired the research project, says: “Cancer patients get confused in the maze of claims and counter-claims, and often turn to the internet for information, which can give advice that has led to real harm and even death in some cases.” Traditional treatments for cancer such as chemotherapy are notoriously unpleasant (and in some countries, expensive), so it’s not surprising that cancer sufferers look for alternatives. Equally, it’s saddening but not surprising that so many sites are keen to part sufferers from their cash.
Cancer-prevention.net is typical of the breed. One of its (many) suggested remedies is M Water, which the site includes because of ‘numerous reports of it reversing cancer’. The site claims that adding M Water to normal water ‘transforms that water into more perfect water with smaller crystals, more coherence and higher energy’. This fights cancer because ‘cells with cancer vibrate at a low energetic level, [so] by drinking this water you start to raise the vibratory levels of the cells and negate the cancer energy vibrations’. Examining such cures on his Aqua Quackery page (www.chem1.com/CQ/gallery.html), retired chemistry professor Stephen Lower describes them variously as ‘garbage’, ‘hokum’, ‘crackpot chemistry’ and ‘pseudoscientific mind-mush’.
Sue Green is the senior cancer information nurse with CancerBACUP (www.cancerbacup.org.uk), the cancer information charity. “The internet can contain a lot of misleading information,” she told us. “Web sites aren’t legally required to ensure that they give accurate advice, so it can be difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff.”
Dr and the medics
ood health sites do exist. Cancer Research UK runs the excellent Cancer Help site (www.cancerhelp.org.uk), while doctors’ bible the British Medical Journal has put together Best Treatments (www.besttreatments. co.uk), a comprehensive look at the effectiveness of drugs, surgery and other treatments for every conceivable condition. It’s one of the best health sites we’ve seen: it presents the evidence for each kind of treatment, enabling you to make an informed choice and to ask the right questions when you speak to health professionals.
New Scientist’s health channel (www.newscientist.com/channel/health) is worth bookmarking, too, while the SkepticWiki blog (www.skepticwiki.org) is proving to be a decent debunker of sites’ wilder claims. Another site worth visiting is Healthline (www.healthline.com), which promises to be a medical Google, and highlights articles that have been reviewed by doctors rather than conjured up by quacks.
Reputable sites don’t usually have any financial interest in the products or treatments they talk about. Dodgy sites, on the other hand, usually do. As CancerBACUP’s Sue Green points out: “We can tell people what is known about different treatments, but we don’t advise on which treatment a patient should or shouldn’t have.” As she explains, reputable sites don’t make real doctors redundant, either. “It is important to bear in mind that some alternative treatments may be harmful or react with some conventional medicines,” she says. “We would suggest that someone considering unconventional treatment talks to their doctor first.”
Very few of us have any medical training, which means we can’t always tell the difference between genuine research and convincing quackery – and that’s something the dodgier sites take full advantage of. By all means do your health homework online, but adopt an attitude of healthy cynicism and always get a second, expert opinion. That way you can be confident that online advice won’t damage your health – or your wealth.
Comments
Sandra / 27/09/2006 / 01:20
Thank you. The article was very informative and interesting.
Mathew Browne / 20/06/2007 / 09:16 / http://www.mbwebdesign.co.uk
You mean those appendage-enhancing pills I get emailed about every other day *don't* work? Next thing you'll be telling me that I *didn't* win an obscure European lottery, that a high-ranking African statesman *doesn't* want to split half of a multi-million dollar inheritance with me, and that I *haven't* been approved for a loan.
Sometimes I despair how spammy and full of rubbish my inbox is, nevermind the Internet at large...
john fisher / 29/11/2007 / 10:48
as a cancer sufferer with a terminal condition should i have to pay for pads needed for bowell
James Hibbard / 28/03/2008 / 19:59 / http://www.yogamart.info
It's too bad as a society we've gotten too much into the whole: 'fix everything with a pill' mentality. Sometimes one medication will negatively impact another or cause a chain of events.
