Letters To The Editor - Brief Article

Medicine Wars

I am very surprised that you allowed Barry Seidman ("Medicine Wars," January/February 2001) to claim that Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw are responsible scientists. They are not. Among other claims, they are if not the originators then at least the promoters of the idea of slimming while you sleep. You take certain amino acids and lo-and-behold miraculously your fat changes overnight into muscle and you lose weight automatically. This in spire of the fact that lean muscle is heavier than fat.

Nevertheless, this idea was used in 1998 and 1999 by an Austrian quack to advertise anonymously but aggressively in major Dutch newspapers with the slogan "Slank terwijl u slaapt" (Slim while you sleep). Similar advertisements had appeared in other European countries. They combined the amino acids with mate tea and a fruit-and-vegetable juice and sold it for roughly ten times the normal retail price of the constituents. Efforts of the Dutch, German, and Austrian skeptics to do something against it resulted in an article in the June 2000 issue of the German magazine Skeptiker about the ineffectiveness of the laws of the countries involved.

After complaints from the Dutch Advertising Practice Committee (a voluntary organization), the firm quit advertising this particular slimming program and shifted to advertising Pu-Erh tea as a slimming tea and after that they started advertising pyruvare (which they misspelled as pyrofat and then "translated" as fatburning). Since October 1999 we have not seen any more advertisements by this firm, but whether this was due to our efforts or because they had earned enough money in the Dutch marker, we do not know.

Of course, Pearson and Shaw cannot be held responsible for the swindling practices of the Austrian Firm, only for the Schlank im Schlaf idea.

Marie P. Prins

Oost-Souburg, Netherlands

Regarding Barry Seidman's remark that herbal medicines are not patentable: If so, how did we manage to parent aspirin, digitalis and so many other drugs first found in herbs? It would seem to me that the process described in John Allen's article that follows Seidman's is indeed patentable. Can't parent the herb? Patent the extraction process! Each newly discovered beneficial herbal compound will require something in the process that others don't, correct? A slightly different solvent material, a modestly differing distillation procedure....

Is it not more nearly accurate to say that pharmaceutical companies may be reluctant to apply an expensive and difficult process of examination to each and every herbal preparation that's widely touted by a credulous lay public because it's so expensive and demanding a task? Given the wild variety of claims made for some of the currently popular drugs, one can easily understand why scientific investigators would and should he cautious.

Some of these herbs are said to cure everything from ataxia to zoophobia! (Now if someone'd just come up with an herb that really cures impotence when Viagra no longer works!)

William D. (Bill) Mayers, RT, RN

Canastota, New York

The special issue on "alternative medicine" was long overdue and drew proper attention to the "alternative" nature of the movement which renders it incapable of being real medicine. In particular, and as with all pseudoscience, it draws its strength from misunderstandings, wishful thinking, and outright deception.

One of the prime examples of the last is the 1993 article by David Eisenberg, M.D., and his coauthors in the New England Journal of Medicine. Barry Seidman cited this report in his "Medicine Wars" and quoted Wallace Sampson, M.D., editor of the Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine (SRAM), as his source for Eisenberg's errors. But he neglected to refer readers to a fuller analysis of the Eisenberg report and the followup survey that appeared in the Fall/Winter 1999 issue (Volume 3, Number 2) of SRAM. This is now available, with some revisions, on the Web at www.hcrc.org/contrib/gorski/eisenb.html.

Tim Gorski, M.D.

Associate Editor, SRAM

xenomed@dnamail.com

Your article "Medicine Wars" reported, as usual, on the percentages of people who use alternative medicines and the potential dangers they pose, especially when the physician doesn't know about the patient's usage. In my experience, when the doctor or his/her nurse asks what medications I am taking, I try to enumerate the vitamins and herbs as well. However, they never record them and typically give some indication that that information is irrelevant. Where is the research on: the percentage of doctors asking the patient for this information; doctors' knowledge of the interactions of herbs and medicines; and doctors' informing patients of those interactions?

Are the researchers writing articles in the medical journals urging doctors to inquire about the herbs and vitamins and to record and/or study possible interactions in their patients?

Perhaps in the future we will have some guidance in these matters from the studies now being sponsored by the National Institutes of Health Alternative Medicine program.