Jun 2009
Zicam, Part II
I discussed Zicam yesterday, but my comments were probably just gloating over the FDA dealing with a unproven supplement in the same manner as it does with regular prescription and over-the-counter drugs. I want to go into some answers to questions I had in my own mind about this product.
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Homeopathic product recall
Today, the US FDA warned consumers to immediately stop using the product Zicam, a homeopathic remedy, because it may cause anosmia, the loss of sense of smell. The FDA has received over 130 adverse reports from consumers who believe that they suffered anosmia after using Zicam.
Zicam is marketed a Big Herba company, Matrixx Initiatives, Inc., and is sold as a remedy for relief of symptoms of colds, flu, and allergies (all with different causes). There is little or no evidence from respected peer reviewed journals that zinc gluconate, the active ingredient in Zicam, has any effect on the course, duration, or severity of common upper respiratory tract infections. The Cochrane Reviews state that, the “evidence of the effects of zinc lozenges for treating the common cold is inconclusive.” Infectious disease researchers from Stanford University have concluded that most positive studies of zinc gluconate are flawed in design and that the “therapeutic effectiveness of zinc lozenges has yet to be established.” A well designed double-blind study published in Clinical Infectious Diseases concludes that the “data do not support a role for intranasal zinc gluconate for prevention or treatment of the common cold.” Read More...
Zicam is marketed a Big Herba company, Matrixx Initiatives, Inc., and is sold as a remedy for relief of symptoms of colds, flu, and allergies (all with different causes). There is little or no evidence from respected peer reviewed journals that zinc gluconate, the active ingredient in Zicam, has any effect on the course, duration, or severity of common upper respiratory tract infections. The Cochrane Reviews state that, the “evidence of the effects of zinc lozenges for treating the common cold is inconclusive.” Infectious disease researchers from Stanford University have concluded that most positive studies of zinc gluconate are flawed in design and that the “therapeutic effectiveness of zinc lozenges has yet to be established.” A well designed double-blind study published in Clinical Infectious Diseases concludes that the “data do not support a role for intranasal zinc gluconate for prevention or treatment of the common cold.” Read More...
Big Herba
One of the strawman arguments I constantly hear is that Big Pharma (the pejorative term used by woo-meisters to describe ethical pharmaceutical companies) block natural therapies because they will lose profits. My argument has always been that if these “therapies” actually worked, Big Pharma would find a way to patent them, bring them to market and make more profits. Well, at least that’s what I thought. Read More...
Alternative medicine–waste of money
As I’ve discussed before, Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) are so-called treatments that lack any scientific or medical support. The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), which was funded by the US Congress to be a part of the National Institutes of Health, continues to discover that these treatments do not work. And it wasted $2.5 billion to discover that they don’t work. I would have done it for $1.5 billion. In fact, given that most of the CAM therapies rely upon ideas that have no foundation in physics, chemistry, biology, physiology or any other science, most of the studies shouldn’t have been done at all. Read More...
Healthcare IT–the perfect product
Jun/08/09 09:29
As discussed previously, I am convinced that the healthcare IT market is poised for explosive growth. I think there are going to be a few challenges to entrepreneurs and larger companies to participate in this growth, including FDA oversight, privacy and security, hardware/software incompatibility, and linking to medical devices. Finally, marketing to the customer base, whether it is the alternate site (physicians, surgery centers, long-term facilities) or hospitals, is going to take individuals who are skilled in the medical products marketing instead of IT marketing. Read More...
Healthcare IT–growth drivers
Jun/03/09 20:03
As I have discussed several times before, there seems to be a significant amount of activity in health information technology. President Obama’s stimulus package includes $19 billion to fund hospitals and individual physicians to upgrade their IT systems, specifically to migrate from paper-based patient records to electronic health records. In the near future, it would be possible for a patient record to be shared between all parts of the healthcare system. For example, patient with a severe trauma can be treated more quickly and effectively, if the emergency room had access to the patients record knowing what health issues may be critical to decisions about treating the patient. Having that information available within minutes can be crucial to saving the patient’s life. Anyone knowledgeable about the healthcare system in the US probably can list out many more examples where an online patient record can be the difference between success and failure in treating a patient.
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