Media Advisory: Watchdogs Call on Shoppers Drug Mart to Remove Ineffective Homeopathic Treatments

January 20, 2012

Media Advisory: Watchdogs Call on Shoppers Drug Mart to Remove Ineffective Homeopathic Treatments


Click below for our Open Letter to Shoppers Drug Mart

Click below for a pdf copy of our Media Advisory 


 

MEDIA ADVISORY

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE


Watchdogs Call on Shoppers Drug Mart to Remove Ineffective Homeopathic Treatments


Toronto, ON—(January 20, 2012)—Last week, CBC’s Marketplace investigated dubious claims made by the manufacturers of Cold-FX, Canada’s most popular cold remedy.  But Cold-FX is not the only suspect cold and flu remedy marketed to Canadians.  


In an open letter sent today, the Centre for Inquiry’s Committee for the Advancement of Scientific Skepticism (CASS) called on Shoppers Drug Mart to stop selling ineffective homeopathic cold and flu remedies.  These remedies – including Boiron’s popular Oscillococcinium brand – involve the repeated dilution of supposed active ingredients to such a degree that there is literally nothing left of those ingredients after the dilution procedure.  No active ingredients means no possible pharmacological activity, and yet these treatments are marketed as effective cold and flu remedies.  


“It is unethical for pharmacists to knowingly sell ineffective health products,” said CASS Researcher Steve Livingston. “Pharmacists we contacted were aware that homeopathic products generally contain nothing but inert ingredients like sugar pills or distilled water.  Yet Shoppers Drug Mart still places these products on their shelves, quite often adjacent to proven treatments.  Combined with misleading advertising and product packaging, Canadians may buy an expensive and ineffective placebo when what they really need is science-based medicine.”


CASS is calling on Shoppers Drug Mart to put their customers’ health ahead of corporate profits, and to cease selling products that make unproven health claims.


The open letter can be found at the link below.


About Us: 


The Committee for the Advancement of Scientific Skepticism critically engages with scientific, technological and medical claims made in public discourse. We address factual inaccuracies and misinformation in public debates by promoting evidence-based science. CASS is a subset of CFI. CFI is the leading freethought organization in Canada promoting reason, science, secularism and freedom of inquiry.


Contact 


Iain Martel, Co-Chair and Spokesperson

Committee for the Advancement of Scientific Skepticism

(416) 929-5075

.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)



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Comments:

#1 Jason Wood (Guest) on Thursday January 26, 2012 at 4:36pm

This page doesn’t load properly in Safari on the Mac. The Letter loads right on top of other content, making it difficult to read.

In Firefox, the letter doesn’t load at all!

#2 Glen MacDonald (Guest) on Saturday February 04, 2012 at 5:11pm

I experience the exact same behavior as described by Jason, on my Mac.

#3 Anonymous (Guest) on Tuesday February 07, 2012 at 5:03pm

For Firefox, I don’t think the operating system matters (even Safari).
When stating if something doesn’t display, the most important information to share is your browser’s version.

Page loaded fine for me with Firefox 3.6.26

That said, I STRONGLY dislike this web design. I detest fixed width layouts like this.

#4 Tom (Guest) on Tuesday February 14, 2012 at 1:51pm

I’m using Chrome and the links to the PDFs don’t show at all. This page looks broken.

#5 Megan (Guest) on Sunday March 18, 2012 at 9:09am

Katie, just a quick clarification angrrdieg the photos, and the hall The pictures were taken from a catwalk that was above and beside the expo hall.  The catwalk was accessible to every person who was in the MTCC, regardless of their connection to the expo.  The general public could freely walk about that catwalk, did not require tickets for entry, and there were no prohibitions of access or photography to/from that location.  In short, that was general access.The ad-hoc signage did not prohibit photography *of* the expo, just *in* the expo.  If the expo didn’t want any photos at all, then they might have taken better care to inform people (not just skeptics).Also, If memory serves me right (which it rarely does, because TV has rotted my brain), there may have been other non-Expo events at the building that day .t’is a big place, and lots of people are free to roam about the place.I appreciate the attention this story has got thus far, but I am somewhat disappointed to see so many people who weren’t there, judge and condemn the attendees/skeptics who were.  I cannot (nor will not) speak to Justin’s experience, but the air of hostility against us that day was well-documented.  I also acknowledge that there are some minor gaps in the narrative between Justin’s, Mitchell’s and my own account, and this can be chalked up to the fact that we were not traveling as a single group, so our experiences were quite different.  But the very fact that there are gaps in the narrative should be reason enough to withhold judgment (ie: the audio recording was but a brief snippet of a much longer exchange), and certainly condemnation.I won’t speak to the priorities of how the CFI should allocate resources and spend PR.  That’s not my affair, and quite outside my scope.  But the commenters characterization (which you tacitly condone) of hippies and flakes is a bit disheartening.  While there was certainly no shortage of corn flakes there, some of the organizations and companies represented there are but spearheads of larger, more organized fronts.  They routinely market (and sell) snake oil as cures for cancer, and successfully lobby the government to take decidedly pseudo-scientific stances which, quite literally, kill desperate people.  If people think that the CFI shouldn’t be spending their energies fighting these initiatives (which beat us regularly), then I’m not sure the movement is worth it’s salt.  Surely, you HAVE to appreciate that this is a value judgment on behalf of the commenter (and maybe yourself), and the language of condemnation might be misplaced, if rash.Thanks,Steve

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