MHRA criticised Vedanate (aka Vedagrin) for misleading claim about Type 2 diabetes

I missed Vedanate / Vedagrin's moment in the spotlight last year when the MHRA (the UK's Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency) put out a press release warning people with Type 2 diabetes to avoid the product, and asked the manufacturers to stop selling it.

From what I can gather the product is still on sale (and it seems it can be bought in the UK) as part of the PayDot affiliate marketing scheme, which is part of the larger TwistForum network.

The company's website (1), which I shan't (hyper)link to is http://www.vedanate.com/ and the PayDot info site (3) for affiliate marketers is at http://www.paydot.com/affiliates/directory/health-beauty/nutritional-supplements/vedanate-1095

1. Vedanate website
The picture of the doctor used on the Vedanate website is suspiciously similar to one used on this unrelated Tech website, so I'd have to assume the use of (perfectly legal) stock photos, though it's a shame that the implication is made that the quote next to the man might have been made by him. It's easy to use tools like Google Images to do a reverse-image search on any picture and find this sort of thing out. It's not a big deal but it amused me.
 

Tech-Hunt website

Vedanate website

The website provides a list of ingredients but no information about any evidence that a combination of these is safe or effective in managing blood glucose levels. I was not able to find any evidence of human trials mentioned on their website, not even in their FAQ.




 

More troubling is that the product is advertised on the website as a 'medicine' - and even if it wasn't advertised in that way I think it would be considered as such by the MHRA, which has recently closed its period of grace for herbal medicines:

"...as of 1st May 2014, unlicensed manufactured herbal medicines without a traditional herbal registration (THR) or product licence (PL) can no longer be sold to consumers and must be removed from shelves" - End of herbal sell through period (30 April 2014) MHRA press release


I don't know if Vedanate has the correct license for sale in the UK....

2. MHRA's 2013 announcement about Vedanate
Vedanate appears to be an unlicensed herbal remedy:

"The advertisement for Vedagrin (also known as Vedanate) promotes the unlicensed medicine as an alternative to prescribed diabetes medication with the words “say goodbye to your diabetes medication forever”. This breaks advertising regulations for medicines and the MHRA has instructed the company to stop selling the product."

 - according to the manufacturers the words in italics have since been removed, I don't know if this means that the MHRA has lifted its requirement for them to stop selling it.

Reference: MHRA issues warning to people with diabetes about dangerous herbal food supplement claims (3 July 2013) MHRA Press release

3. PayDot network's website for Vedanate affiliate marketers
Affiliate marketers create websites to highlight the benefits of a particular product and encourage people to buy it. There's a link on their site that refers visitors to the Vedanate website from which they can buy it, and in doing so the affiliate marketer receives a cut of the sales (15% for Vedanate). Presumably the more affiliate websites there are for a product, the greater the chance of someone coming across that product, in this case Vedanate.

PayDot liaises between the makers of Vedanate and the affiliates who refer purchasers to the product website, and they provide information about the product for potential affiliates, for example:

"Why promote Vedanate?
Thanks to our affiliate program webmasters have ability to earn by helping people suffering from type II diabetes. We have all necessary tools for webmasters (text links, wide choice of banners in English and German) to productively work together."

PayDot also have another diabetes product on their market, called Diabain.

I've previously written on the MoreNiche network, which is another TwistForum affiliate network that has a variety of products for sale including Phen375 and the Office of Fair Trading worked with them to make sure that affiliate sites are much clearer that they are taking a small cut of the profits (here's an example discussion on the MoreNiche forum).

Misleading health claims around the world - going global

A few years ago I learned, by accident, that the UK's Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) would handle complaints made about organisations based outside the UK. My complaint was against an organisation claiming it could reverse Type 2 diabetes - their ad had appeared on my Facebook page (I was working at Diabetes UK at the time so the algorithms probably brought up a lot more diabetes stuff than they do now), so I took a screenshot and reported it.

The organisation turned out to be based in Spain but through the ASA's cross-border agreement it was passed to the Spanish ASA equivalent to handle the complaint, who investigated, and an adjudication was upheld against the organisation.

Given that UK people will see adverts from all over the world it makes sense that we can report them to the relevant authorities if they're misleading. More recently I've been looking into the list of countries that the ASA will liaise with, both European (Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Turkey) and non European (Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, India, New Zealand and South Africa) and began to wonder what can be done about misleading claims from the US.

Yesterday I found out that the US' Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will apparently take complaints about US adverts from UK citizens, though I've not yet tested it, so we'll see.

@FTC Will you accept consumer complaints from complainants in the UK? (Marketer complained about is based in the US). Thanks :)
— Jo Brodie (@JoBrodie) May 8, 2014

@FTC It's someone making misleading health claims on their website. Complaints straightforward in UK but not sure of how to do a US one yet.
— Jo Brodie (@JoBrodie) May 8, 2014

@JoBrodie Hi Jo, you can file complaints with the FTC at http://t.co/g3okfpjGWW. Thank you.
— FTC (@FTC) May 9, 2014

The FTC has recently taken some quite firm action on people making misleading claims about diabetes, which is great to see - FTC Obtains $2.2 Million Judgment against Supplement Marketer that Made Phony Claims for Treating and Preventing Diabetes (7 March 2014) - FTC's press release.

There's no guarantee though that they'll process a complaint in the way that the ASA does (the ASA publishes an adjudication on its website) particularly as they let complainants know that:

"Your complaint may help us and our law enforcement partners detect patterns of fraud and abuse, which may lead to investigations and eliminate unfair business practices. Complaints are entered in our secure online database, which is used by many local, state, federal, and international law enforcement agencies. The FTC cannot resolve individual complaints, but we can provide information about what next steps to take."

So I'll put a complaint in to the FTC, though I may well never hear of it again :)

2014 Open Air Cinema season

It's already upon us :) Gone are the days when we'd have to wait until Summer was here before hearing about open air films, the New Cross and Deptford Free Film Festival already hosted an outdoor screening of Grease this weekend. So I'm really a bit behind in posting anything at all this year.

Nevertheless, here's what Pop-Up Screens will be showing in their Summer season. Tickets £10 from http://www.popupscreens.co.uk/movies/

Eventually I'll transfer all this info to my bigger collection https://sites.google.com/site/openaircinemascreens/

July
Labyrinth, Friday 11 July, Morden Hall Park, Morden
The Breakfast Club, Morden Hall Park, Morden, Sunday 13 July
Anchorman, Friday 18 July, Bishop's Park, Fulham
Empire Records, Saturday 19 July, Bishop's Park, Fulham
Ghostbusters, Sunday 20 July, Bishop's Park, Fulham
Shaun of the Dead, Friday 25 July, Mycenae House, Blackheath

August
The Faculty, Friday 1 August, Ravenscourt Park, Hammersmith
Grease, Sunday 3 August, Ravenscourt Park, Hammersmith
The Big Lebowski, Saturday 9 August, Manor House Gardens, Lewisham
Top Gun, Sunday 10 August, Manor House Gardens, Lewisham
Dumb & Dumber, Thursday 14 August, Coram's Fields, Holborn
Dirty Dancing, Saturday 16 August, Coram's Fields, Holborn
Jurassic Park, Sunday 17 August, Coram's Fields, Holborn
Never Ending Story, Thursday 21 August, Morden Hall Park, Morden
Mamma Mia, Sunday 24 August, Morden Hall Park, Morden
Blade, Friday 29 August, Bishop's Park, Fulham
The Notebook, Saturday 30 August, Bishop's Park, Fulham
Back to the Future, Sunday 31 August, Bishop's Park, Fulham

September
American Beauty, Sunday 7 September, Manor House Gardens, Lewisham
Heathers, Friday 12 September, Ravenscourt Park, Hammersmith
Pulp Fiction, Saturday 13 September, Ravenscourt Park, Hammersmith
The Goonies, Friday 26 September, East Greenwich Pleasaunce
Forrest Gump, Saturday 27 September, East Greenwich Pleasaunce

A Storify of my #TwitterTips tweets

I Storified the tweets I sent earlier today, about useful things I've found on Twitter, and now I'm embedding the Storify of the tweets into my blog. If I add this blog post to the bottom of the Storify I'll probably break the internet...

You'll have to click on the 'Read next page...' at the bottom to see the final four or five tweets.

Twitter kind of tells you if someone hasn't clicked on a link... which is a little bit creepy

My blog is a bit like Hugh Grant's character in About a Boy. I once wrote a post that was unusually popular (typically it was rustled up quite quickly as a minor observation about blocking on Twitter) and thanks to that my blog scores mildly higher in Google's esteem than it might otherwise. The post views are very 'long tail' with one vastly popular post, two or three tolerably well-viewed and everything else languishing ;)

I've also learned, from Google Analytics, that almost all of my traffic comes from Google searches and relatively little from Twitter. In fact I probably only post to Twitter between a third / half of the posts that I write as it doesn't make a huge deal of difference. Obviously I'll post this one to Twitter but chances are you'll have come across this by some other means.

Twitter Analytics has also confirmed this and links to my blog typically get somewhere between 0 and 20 hits with a few outliers that get more clicks (the one on catching a camera going off mid-flash did quite well) and even my most popular post on this blog doesn't do particularly well if shared on Twitter.

What I was surprised to notice though was that Twitter Analytics tells you if a link has had zero clicks and, of course, if you have sent the link to someone this rather suggests that they've not clicked on it.

I find that a tiny bit troubling: surely it's everyone's right to click or not click on links that people send without the sender being indirectly informed. Troubling's too strong a word perhaps.

There are several ways that a link might get clicked on
a) you send it to someone who sees it and clicks
b) you send it to someone and someone else following both of you sees it and clicks
c) someone looking at your timeline sees it and clicks
d) someone searching Twitter for a keyword sees the tweet and clicks

But if it's had 0 clicks (and was sent to someone) then it's reasonable to assume that they've not clicked on it (though they may recognise the URL and have previously seen it). This rather makes me want to click on every link every sent to me to avoid giving offence ;-)

Don't forget that if a link in an URL says it's been clicked once you've no idea of course who clicked it and if it was the person you've sent it to. In terms of privacy I think this is preferable, and a bit of me think that all Twitter Analytics links should report all links as having had '1 click'.

---

Anyway here are the links in my tweets that were clicked on a fair bit. Since the images are all wider than the blog window permits I'm afraid you'll have to click on them to enlarge.

175 clicks for a rather good comment pointing out that Ben Goldacre's a bit of a genius :)

124 clicks for David Arnold's concert at the Royal Festival Hall on 6 July - film music (Stargate, Independence Day, Bond films) and TV music (Sherlock) stuff, yippee :)

Note the two tweets which demonstrate that the number of clicks shown is cumulative. Were I to tweet that link now it would already be at 124 and any further increase in clicks would be added to all the tweets where this link appears, ie it's a total number.

I think it would be much more useful to know that a tweet sent at 10am garnered more clicks than one sent at 3pm rather than just giving a total. There are services (probably not free) that offer this sort of insight, probably businesses use it to find out when best to engage with their audience and not spammily annoy them.




50 clicks for this interesting post from my friend Guy on a most unpleasant situation that I was unfortunately involved in and very glad to see that it seems to be the end of it.





0 clicks. Here's a tweet I sent to myself (it's actually visible to ALL of my followers because they follow both me and the person ('me') to whom I sent the tweet). I sent it and then immediately captured this image from Twitter analytics before it was clicked on. Then I clicked on it (on my phone) and a few minutes later it showed that someone had clicked on it (doesn't prove it was me of course).