Product background check help!

[liggy 0]

Hey guys... long story short, my uncle has liver cancer and he is starting to lose the battle. And like always, throwing money at it is the first solution that comes to everyone's mind when fear starts to loom.(shutupandtakemymoney.jpg). Anyways, one of the things my aunts are trying to get for my uncle were these $160 supplements (among other things). I actually saw one of the empty bottles and try to google it, but couldn't find anything on it. No review, blogs, forum post on "US #1 Immuno-Co".

I just don't want to be blowing money on some scam/crap products.
Is there any other avenues i could try to dig up dirt on this product??

Our family is quite large and has quite a few cancer survivors, also a close friend who beat liver cancer, but he did it through shear will and exercised a lot. he trains jiu jitsu like everyday lol...

My uncle not so much, the will to fight is there, but not so much, which i think is the key. But it has been pretty hard for him to muster up the will, esp since they got a fung shui spiritualist come to the house and tell us there's a dark spirit attached to my uncle... (ya, we're asian and the adults are still superstitious....) like we need that in the back of his mind..

back on topic, how do i look these guys and this product up??
http://www.usnhp.us/immune-formula-u.s-1/

[Byrthnoth]

I guess I'll be the one to do this.

Substances that are categorized as "dietary supplements" are not subject to testing as rigorous or purity requirements as stringent as "medicine." Basically, the FDA does not require that dietary supplement makers prove their product has any positive effect on your health and (IIRC) the testing requirements don't require long-term trials. Maybe it works and the inventors are so excited about it that they want to push it out there quickly (and make a shitton of cash at $160 a bottle). More likely, it's a glorified sugar pill with questionable ingredients that may be poisoning your uncle in the long term and he'd live longer if you replaced them with pure sugar pills, and your aunt is being taken advantage of by the kind of people that take advantage of desperate old asians.

It may have some positive value for your uncle if he thinks it is working (although the placebo effect assumed to be associated with positive thinking has not been borne out in the recent literature.) It would probably be more enjoyable for your uncle and equally likely to help him if he decided that the cure for his cancer was something like Hot Chocolate, though.

I'm preemptively sorry for your loss. Liver cancer is a bitch.

[liggy 0]

Aye, thanks.

Unless it actually did help, best i was hoping for was placebo effect. just hard to (at least for me) swallow the price tag for a placebo...

[Rabidelly]

Maybe you can talk to your family and try filling the empty bottles with regular vitamins or sugarpills or somesuch? Then you can maybe get a placebo effect w/o the nasty pricetag.

[Byrthnoth]

The sad thing is that it's really not worth it. The placebo effect depends a lot on the people giving you the medicine believing in it as well, so he'd have to deceive his relatives into thinking that the medicine was at least as legit as the stuff he linked above.

If he does do that (essentially double-blinding the uncle's experience by telling his aunt that he'll procure the medicine and then just filling old bottles with vitamin C pills), there are two possible outcomes. In an ideal case, his aunt will never find out and he'll have saved her a thousand dollars or so. In a less ideal case, she will find out and she will blame him for the death of her husband. Avoiding a chance of that much old Asian rage is worth $1000.

[Rabidelly]

It's an option if they're dead set on getting these pills, but money is an issue. It's not going to end well no matter what, sadly. Thing is, liver cancer is not going to be cured by a pill. It's a resistant son-of-a-bitch and I hope he has a quality remainder of life with his family. Hopefully the rest of the family understands this, but I do get that they want to try everything and it's hope that they can do something, anything to help. I'm not in any way suggesting he do this without his family (minus the uncle) knowing. If he went that route, I would certainly hope it was because he talked to his family about it and they made a decision together.

[Kerberoz]

Substances that are categorized as "dietary supplements" are not subject to testing as rigorous or purity requirements as stringent as "medicine."

Yep. More on this:
http://www.quackwatch.org/02Consumer...ion/dshea.html
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/20...icancer-magic/
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/20...ry-conditions/

[Byrthnoth]

Yeah, it looks like I was actually underselling how little power the FDA has over them:

The 1994 Dietary Supplement Act does not require that dietary supplements (defined broadly to include many substances, such as herbs and amino acids, that have no nutritive value) be shown to be safe or effective before they are marketed. The FDA does not scrutinize a dietary supplement before it enters the marketplace. The agency is permitted to restrict a substance if it poses a "significant and unreasonable risk" under the conditions of use on the label or as commonly consumed.

The safety standard may sound as if the FDA has all the authority it needs to protect the public. The problem is that the burden of proof lies with the FDA. Even when the agency is able to act, how is it supposed to know which products contain [a known carcinogen], and who sells them? What is the agency supposed to tell people who may have consumed these herbs? Congress has put the FDA in the position of being able to act only after the fact and after substantial harm has already occurred.

This makes buying dietary supplements from no-name producers seem like an even worse idea. I have to imagine that it would be possible to run the legal equivalent of a shifting storefront where you constantly change your legal identity so that the FDA can't take you to court for the damages that your product causes. At the same time, you could keep manufacturing and selling essentially the same product with different names to reduce overhead.


tl;dr:
If you're going to buy a dietary supplement, at least buy it from someone like GNC that you trust will still be around in 5 years when urologists connect your herbal remedy with bladder cancer. Then your family can make some of the money you spent back off the resulting lawsuit.