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The Non-Prescription Products – Market-Profits and Public Health in Conflict
Published in Mickey C. Smith, E.M. (Mick) Kolassa, Walter Steven Pray, Government, Big Pharma, and the People, 2020
Perhaps the simplest definition of quackery was published in a 1990 brochure entitled, “Quackery…The Billion Dollar Miracle Business” (640). FDA, FTC, the Postal Service, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Pharmaceutical Advertising Council jointly defined quackery as “…the promotion of a medical remedy that doesn’t work or hasn’t been proven to work”.
Knowledge, names, fraud and trust
Published in Geraldine Lee-Treweek, Tom Heller, Hilary MacQueen, Julie Stone, Sue Spurr, Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Structures and Safeguards, 2020
These kinds of factors indicate that the label ‘fraud’ is often intermingled with other disputes over what constitutes acceptable knowledge. Stephen Barrett, a key figure in the US group Quackwatch, argues: quackery could be broadly defined as ‘anything involving overpromotion in the field of health.’ This definition would include questionable ideas as well as questionable products and services, regardless of the sincerity of their promoters. In line with this definition, the word ‘fraud’ would be reserved only for situations in which deliberate deception is involved. Unproven methods are not necessarily quackery. Those consistent with established scientific concepts may be considered experimental.(Barrett, 2004)
Rhetorics of Empowerment for Managing Lupus Pain
Published in Jamie White-Farnham, Bryna Siegel Finer, Cathryn Molloy, Women’s Health Advocacy, 2019
The rhetorical barriers to alternative treatment options can also be found in the discourses surrounding supplements on medical websites. On the OWH site, for instance, patients are provided with a list of six categories of medicines for treating lupus: NSAIDs, corticosteroids, antimalarials, BLys-specific inhibitors, immunosuppressive drugs, and “other” medicines. The category of “other” does not mention supplements or alternative medicines, suggesting that these are still regarded as “quackery” in medical discourse (Derkatch, 2016), even though supplements are used by more than half of all adults in the US, as reported by the CDC on WedMD (Afshar, 2015). Instead, supplements are discussed as an appended item toward the end of the section under the “Talk to Your Doctor” heading, followed by a list of cautionary items or special circumstances, such as side effects, new symptoms, and pregnancy.
Knowledge, attitude and practices among consumers toward antibiotics use and antibiotic resistance in Swat, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan
Published in Expert Review of Anti-infective Therapy, 2020
Faiz Ullah Khan, Farman Ullah Khan, Khezar Hayat, Jie Chang, Amna Saeed, Zakir Khan, Muhammad Ashraf, Usman Malik Rasheed, Naveel Atif, Wenjing Ji, Muhammad Majid Aziz, Yu Fang
Moreover, other triggering factors of antibiotic resistance comprised of prescriber’s experience and knowledge, uncertainty in diagnosis, perceptions of patients about the physician interaction, and inadequate patient education [18]. Currently, the government launched a crackdown against quackery and sealed 22,913 outlets in the Punjab province with a pledge to regulate the sale of antibiotics in the capital city (Islamabad). However, the implementation of such regulations about medicines should be extended across the country [19]. Principally, improving awareness of the general public about potential risks related to self-medication should be considered priorities [20,21]. Community-based antimicrobial stewardship programs and awareness about antibiotic resistance are needed to implement effectively [21,22]. A qualified pharmacist must present at the pharmacy to counsel the patients and more likely their services are needed in rural areas of Swat and Pakistan as a whole.
Contextualising the microbiota–gut–brain axis in history and culture
Published in Microbial Ecology in Health and Disease, 2018
Alison M. Moore, Manon Mathias, Jørgen Valeur
However, the discovery of microorganisms at the end of the nineteenth century did impact one important area of mind–gut consideration, fuelling the pre-existing concept of ‘autointoxication’ – a topic discussed in the papers by Mathias, Lillestøl and Moore in this special issue. Early configurations of this concept viewed constipation as dangerous because it was thought that toxic biproducts of digestion were absorbed into the blood, causing a systemic poisoning of the body which included the brain and the nervous system. Microbes had been found in vitro to putrefy animal and vegetable material, so it was assumed that they also did so in the colon, providing mechanistic support to the theory of autointoxication [6]. As Mathias’ paper in this volume shows, both German and French physicians in the late-nineteenth century indicated that microbes might be responsible for the autointoxication they ascribed to constipation, and in 1887, the French physician Charles Bouchard proposed microbial imbalance as the cause of several diseases he saw as resulting from autointoxication. Mathias also suggests why these ideas were so widespread in France, especially in relation to mental distress, and why they became discredited in twentieth-century scientific research – in part because popular uptakes of autointoxication by purveyors of herbal remedies and enemas to relieve constipation, as well as by evangelical diet gurus such as the American John Harvey Kellogg, reduced the reputation of the theory by associating it with widespread quackery.
Autointoxication and historical precursors of the microbiome–gut–brain axis
Published in Microbial Ecology in Health and Disease, 2018
A further reason behind autointoxication theory’s decline was that it quickly became associated with quackery. Alongside the legitimate scientific interest in the effects of intestinal bacteria on health, alternative practitioners and charlatans were alert to the financial possibilities offered by the idea that cleaning out the colon could instantly improve wellbeing [22]. Opportunistic entrepreneurs appropriated the theory in order to sell dubious therapies based on unfounded claims. Charles A. Tyrrell’s syringe enema, ‘the Cascade’, for example, purported to cure a host of maladies, all of which Tyrrell attributed to so-called intestinal poisoning [22] (Figure 3).