Home - General Info - Treatments Search - Index - Email

---

Unlisted or Unknown Ingredients

Using any product without knowing what's in it is dangerous, to both health and wealth. The following reasons are just a few examples of why a manufacturer might keep ingredients secret, why customers should avoid such products, and why we should, for the most part, believe those who are up-front with their ingredients. These are applicable to any disease and any product:

• Fraud: The manufacturer knows for a fact that the ingredients in the product are worthless for the disease in question. Keeping the ingredients a secret enables the manufacturer to avoid the scrutiny of the FDA or FTC (or similar organizations in other countries), as long as the manufacturer makes no specific treatment claims in any advertising or product literature. Anyone who makes a claim to treat a disease must, in the U.S.A., be able to back up that claim with sufficient medical proof. This whole paragrpah also applies to those people who fervently believe that the ingredients really do work, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that they do not.

• Trade Secrets: Many of those who claim that the ingredients must be kept a trade secret are only doing so to cover up a fraud (see above). Those who aren't are concerned that if the ingredients become public, then better-funded competitors will swamp the market with duplicate products, and no profit (or "return on investment") will be forthcoming. Patents exist to protect new and unique treatment methods, but not all treatments are patentable (many alternative medicines aren't). To the FDA, it doesn't matter if a drug is protected or not, the ingredients must be disclosed, or no claims of treatment may be made.

• Simple Mistakes: When I first saw the Psoriasin Web site, I thought "uhoh, another magical treatment with no ingredients listed." However, I emailed the company, and got a prompt response detailing the ingredients. Seems to me to simply be an oversight on the part of their Web site designer that the ingredients are not listed there. This may, unfortunately, be a rare occurrance, as I believe unscrupulous companies outnumber the honest when it comes to unlisted ingredients.

• Evidence: Why should we believe what anyone says about the ingredients they do list? Because if someone says, "our product contains so-many grams of such-and-such a drug," this is fairly easy to verify. And if any evidence comes along that they're lying, it will be verified.