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Welcome to the May 2012 homepage edition of i2P-Information to Pharmacists. Rollo Manning has been having some time out having staples removed from the site of his open heart surgery.He is now at home recuperating in Darwin, having arrived home last Friday, beating a cold and hasty retreat from Canberra.We all wish him a speedy recovery and hopefully, he will be fit enough to contribute by next month.
This month, Pharmedia discusses the toll that is taken when someone complains about you to an authority without good cause. Well, the good news is that you can now take action to protect yourself if such a complaint is made, and that may even include action for defamation. Read about a recent case involving two doctors, with Mark Coleman drawing on personal experience to illustrate.

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The McGrath Foundation-Pharmacy Faux Pas

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	Loretta Marron BSc articles by this author...
From a Skeptics Perspective: Loretta Marron, a science graduate with a business background, was Australian Skeptic of the Year for 2007 and in 2011. She edits the website www.healthinformation.com.au.

A near life-size image of Glenn McGrath holding a large sign “Every Blackmores Multi purchase helps support the McGrath Foundation” stands outside my local pharmacy.   With a growing body of evidence that many complementary medicines (CM)’s may be doing more harm than good, it is clearly inappropriate that this Foundation, set up to improve the wellbeing of cancer patients, should choose to be sponsored by a complementary medicine manufacturer, many of whose products have little or no good evidence to support the claims made for them.

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With sales of Blackmores ‘tickled pink caps’ now exceeding half a million, there is no denying that this emotive campaign is extremely successful.  It is well pitched and ticks all the clever ‘advertising tricks’ boxes; a multitude of overt and covert messages, all designed to motivate shoppers to purchase their CM’s, and all supposedly to help breast cancer patients.

Blackmores are clearly aware of the huge profits that can be gained by marketing any product claiming weight loss indications and, despite the well publicized obesity epidemic in this country, they have continued to promote expensive and useless products that undermine people’s attempts to lose weight, at great cost both financially and, when they fail and give up trying, to their health. 

It has taken considerable effort to challenge these products and their inclusion on the TGA register.  However new guidelines, which Blackmores were actively involved in and would therefore be aware of,  have now been completed and will shortly be implemented, and when this happens, this range of Blackmores products will be removed from the shelves. 

McGrath is an iconic Australian sporting hero.  We all followed his wife Jane’s recurrent battles with breast and bone cancer.  She died in 2008, a year after setting up the Foundation to help other Breast Cancer patients. 

The association between McGrath and Blackmores is also now well known.  A GOOGLE search using the terms ‘Glenn McGrath’ and ‘Blackmores’ produces over 10,000 hits. 

Listed on the Australian stock exchange, Blackmores core strategy of ‘relationship marketing’, that includes tying the profits of sales of specific products to particular health conditions, aims at driving deeper loyalty and trust in their brand in the pharmacies who stock their products.  In 2008/09 they posted “a before-tax profit of $30.6 million”. 

Search the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA)’s complaints register and you will find 13 complaints upheld against Blackmore advertising.  With many of their products approved on evidence of ‘traditional use’, compare the claims on their packaging with current research and you will soon find examples of misinformation or exaggeration. 

According to medical oncologist, Professor Ray Lowenthal, there is “very little good evidence in favour of the use of high or extra doses of vitamins for this purpose.  Thus my opinion is that one must be very cautious promoting what at best is an unproven treatment and at worst is potentially harmful.”

His opinion is supported by NSW Cancer Council’s nutrition program manager, Kathy Chapman, who says that vitamin supplements are "not all they're cracked up to be" and that “cancer patients can be very vulnerable to suggestions, including marketing promotions, that taking supplements can do them more good than what can be backed up by clear evidence.”

Dr Geraldine Moses, consultant pharmacist, Adverse Medicine Events (AME) line, says that "Vitamin products may seem harmless, but they often contain non-vitamin ingredients, such a bioflavanoids, herbs and minerals, which carry a higher potential than vitamins for drug interactions and adverse effects.”   

She also warns that this raises medico-legal issues because “if consumers are not warned of the potential risks and interactions associated with vitamin-containing products, the people promoting them can be held responsible for potential adverse effects.”

Psychology Prof Joseph Forgas, told the Foundation that “people are not usually able to critically evaluate the substance of conflicting and often unsubstantiated claims about alternative therapies. There is a great deal of confusion about these matters, and the mere association of an organisation like yours with companies that have a commercial interest in selling medically useless products is liable to create even more confusion in peoples’ minds.” 

They are, in essence, trading their “good name and credibility for financial support”. 

Surviving cancer is already an extremely difficult and challenging journey.  Cancer patients will not thank Pharmacies for knowingly recommending, by implication, hundreds of useless, expensive and potentially harmful so-called ‘natural’ products.  Cancer patients will also not thank the McGrath Foundation for being badly informed when, at the end of the day, they desperately need to be supported and not exploited.  For our benefit they should give clarity to their mission and rethink this choice of sponsor.

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