Bullshit for baldness

More amazing than the sheer volume of nonsense products on the shelves of pharmacies are the lies that are allowed to be told in order to sell them.  Take this interesting cure for baldness for example.

Here are the claims by Nanogen Serum VEGF:

Patent Pending Technology

Growth factors are a cutting edge technology, pioneered by Nanogen for treating thinning hair.
The Natural Solution for Hair Loss
VEGF is a growth factor like the ones humans produce naturally. VEGF maintains hair growth and ensures nutrients and oxygen reach the hair, allowing it to grow. It also acts against the factors that cause hair to fall out, maintaining hair growth.

Now, Vascular Endothelial Growth factor (VEGF) is a growth factor produced by your body.  There is such a thing.  It's a big old protein, and if this product contained any synthetic VEGF it would need to be a lot more expensive than £30. The business of manufacturing recombinant proteins is not cheap or simple.  You can buy 25 micrograms (25 millionths of a gram)  for about £200. Even if you did get your hands on some recombinant VEGF, you couldn't use it in a medicinal product without jumping through a lot of regulatory hoops - it would be prescription only.  So, what's going on here?

Apparently:

Nanogen Serum VEGF is a safe, plant derived sh-VEGF growth factor serum that reduces hair loss and promotes existing hair growth

So, it's plant-derived, and it's not VEGF, it's sh-VEGF.  How does this change the story?


You could no doubt stitch together a story about how baldness is due to a lack of blood supply to hair follicles, and that VEGF stimulates the growth of blood vessels. Almost certainly such a notion inspired this product.  However, let's not even consider the possible therapeutic value of VEGF (or sh-VEGF) in treating baldness until there is some evidence the product contains any.  We've already ruled out VEGF itself.  What about this sh-VEGF?


The only mention of sh-VEGF you will find in the scientific literature is short hairpin RNA for VEGF, a man-made tool for preventing VEGF gene expression in experimental cell biology.  Researchers have made sh-RNA to prevent the expression of all manner of genes.  It's a complex, but common technique.  Needless to say, there is no way on this earth that a product containing such a thing would be on sale on the open shelves of a pharmacy either.  This magic potion almost certainly has no active ingredient.  It's just plain bullshit. There really ought to be a law.


What's the point of all this pseudoscientific frippery then?  You could make up any old nano/quantum/etc bullshit as a sales pitch, but Google wouldn't lend any credence to it.  However, if you type sh-VEGF into Google, you will get loads of hits - most of it scientific studies using short hairpin RNA silencing techniques.  Anyone not remotely familiar with the field would think that there is a lot of science surrounding sh-VEGF and have faith in the product.  Googlers with a little familiarity with science might even find some reassuring phrases in what turns up (eg "growth" and "stimulated").

On the other hand, other people might be disturbed by the notion of inhibiting gene expression in their body - playing with your very own DNA.  But nothing could go seriously wrong, could it? Not from something "plant-derived"?  See what they did there?


Again, there ought to be a law.

[See also: Caffeine for hair loss.]

Sugar rots your teeth

Babies make splendid subjects for placebo effects by proxy.  Dogs, horses and cows will do pretty much as well (the rest of the animal kingdom rarely rate a mention). So it's no surprise to find some outright quackery amongst the possibly efficacious teething remedies in a high street chemist.

Mothers may enjoy ease of mind in the knowledge that these powders are reliable and contain nothing harmful.  Charged solely with a preparation of a selected part of the plant Matricaria, they do not contain Calomel or other Mercury Compounds.

These are, in fact, lactose and nothing more.  There's a lot of fun to be had taking the mickey out of pharmacies selling sugar pills (it's all over the internet), but that's not what is interesting here.  Consider the language: it's not from this century, is it?  Calomel? How many people know what calomel is, or know that it has a long history (along with, say, arsenic) of use in medicine as a theatrical poison in the days of heroic medicine.  This reassurance that these powders contain no calomel sounds like a warning from the nineteenth century.

It probably is.

Ashtons and Parsons are an old firm of homeopaths, dating back as far as 1867 (so @quackwriter assures me).  In the Wellcome Library you will find an old pamphlet of theirs from ca. 1910.  In the endpages are some advertisements for their more popular remedies of the day, including these Infant Powders.  The 1910 advert proclaims that:

The Ashton and Parsons Infant Powders are intended to ease pain and sooth the child; check stomach disorders; correct the motions; relieve fever, restlessness, fretfulness and similar troubles incidental to the teething period; and are useful in delayed or unduly prolonged dentition.

This has been updated for a 2011 audience as follows:

Ashton and Parsons Infants’ Powders are intended to soothe the child; check stomach disorders; correct the motions; relieve restlessness, fretfulness and similar troubles incidental to the teething period; and are useful in delayed or unduly prolonged dentition.

So, in 2011 we get much the same text as my grandmother's mother did.  It doesn't stop there; consider the dosing recommendations from 2011:

How to use

For children under six months:

            Half a powder

Above six months:

            One powder; dry on the tongue, night and morning.

When the child is very restless or fretful, the dose can be repeated every one, two or three hours if necessary until improvement.

Compare that with the 1910 version:

Dose: Under six months half a Powder, above six months one Powder, dry on the tongue, night and morning.  When the child is very restless, fretful or feverish, the dose can be repeated every one, two or three hours if necessary, until improvement.

It's only the safety information that seems to vary from century to century. From 1910:

REMEMBER: These Powders are guaranteed to be perfectly harmless

While today, we are warned:

Keep all medicines out of the reach of children.

Fart pills

No, not pills that make you fart, pills that supposedly stop you farting.  People fart on average about 14 times a day, although this varies enormously from person to person and is probably dependent to a significant extent on diet.  Mrs JDM claims to never fart at all, while one of my colleagues is rather famous for his ability to pass gas. Of course, mild gastrointestinal upsets like diarrhea can produce increased gas in the system.  On the other hand, some people become a bit over obsessed about their otherwise normal flatulence. So, what has a leading high street pharmacy got for us in this department?

Windeze - (simeticone)

WindSetlers - (dimeticone)

Both of these remedies contain polydimethylsiloxanes, or silicones. They are thought to act by reducing the surface tension of gas bubbles, making them coalesce.  They were introduced into medicine to aid gastroscopy - all the little bubbles in your stomach make getting a clear image rather difficult.  They have also been used to assist  imaging at the other end, in colonoscopy.  But do they stop you farting?

Here's a cynical answer: Some chiropractors chose  dimetacone as a "control" to test their spinal wizardry against in colicky infants.  It's no surprise to find, then, that we've known for quite a while that they are ineffective in colic, and that chiropractic is only equally ineffective.  That's not farting though.

A more complete answer is that there is no evidence that these compounds provide relief from excessive farting, and we've known that for a considerable time.  The trick is to stop feeding the gas-producing gut flora by avoiding foods that are rich in carbohydrates that aren't fully absorbed by the body, such as those in beans and cabbage.

Another sugar to avoid is lactose, so don't expect homeopathic fart pills to have the desired effect!