Now that’s a really horrifying use of “homeopathy” – that haha medical “treatment” that takes care to wash away every trace of the active ingredient.
It’s insulting on top of recklessly endangering, charging $15.99 for a tiny amount of water. But the reckless endangerment is the horrifying part. Asthma can kill! How can a “spray” with no active ingredient offer any kind of relief, temporary or otherwise, for asthma symptoms? It’s not going to shrink the swollen inflamed airways, so what relief can it offer?
It’s criminal.
And this crap is sold at “legitimate” pharmacies right alongside actual medicine. Of course, they also sell cigarettes. At least hospitals have stopped allowing smoking pretty much anywhere on the grounds.
“Taste free.” No shit. A complete lack of ingredients will do that.
I can see ‘TGT*DFD’ just under the yellow box in the second picture.
Try Genuine Treatments * Don’t Fucking Die, perhaps?
Sorry, not the second picture, just the bottom of the only picture.
DOH!
It claims it treats illness. So yes, it probably *is* criminal. I don’t think non-medicines are allowed to claim they can treat illnesses (or symptoms).
Notice also the weasel words ‘temporary’ and ‘minor’ on the box. Stuff didn’t actually fix your asthma? I guess it just wasn’t minor enough…
$16 for a quarter cup of water is outrageous.
wheezing, shortness of breath, tightness of chest are not symptoms of minor asthma. It is a bad sign if someone is wheezing. I have watched my 6 year old son go through asthma attacks. It is miserable for him. What these people are doing is criminal.
The “unit price” unit is a pint?
seriously?
Thanks to the US Congress, that’s not the case. The FDA is pretty much forbidden by law from regulating homeopathy or herbal supplements.
Placebo in a bottle. What price delusion?
So if someone suffocates using this will the makers get off by claiming the victim died of stupid instead of asthma?
up&up is a generic/store brand sold by Target stores.
I think angharad is on the right track with that. If the attack is bad enough to cause any serious damage, then by definition, it’s not “minor”. The producers can argue that the spray was incorrectly used and they’re not responsible.
No wonder homeopathy is such big business. It’s every greedy capitalist’s wet dream. It costs next to nothing to produce, you can’t be held responsible if anything goes wrong, your customers will bend over backwards trying to give you credit for anything they can think of, and to top it all off, you get to pretend that the people selling real medicine are the greedy, immoral fuckers.
FTFY. BTW, $178 a pint. Cheaper to home-brew.
I have mild asthma, and know the panic that comes with the feeling of not being able to breathe.
I have a friend who had fairly severe asthma when we were young, and I remember watching her try to struggle through an attack once when she didn’t have her inhaler on her. It was terrifying.
I have a work colleague, younger than me, who had an asthma attack that was uncontrollable by her own medicine and progressed quickly enough that it brought on a cardiac event shortly after the paramedics arrived. She went into a coma and died a few days later.
So words cannot express the depth of loathing I have for anyone involved in foisting this “product” onto people.
I use a spray bottle full of water all the time for watering plants.
The price of real asthma inhalers has been going up, to the point where the uninsured and underinsured in this country cannot afford rescue inhalers. Luckily at least one controller medication is generic now (Singulair), but it isn’t enough for everyone.
So I can see this $15 product looking pretty tempting to someone who doesn’t know any better…
And #8 karmacat is right, when it gets to wheezing it isn’t mild.
I have asthma. The feeling that, as you’re blacking out, you don’t know whether you’ll wake up again is the the most terrifying thing there is.
On a lighter note, my favourite homeo joke.
A homeopathic doctor goes fishing and while reeling in a big one he gets pulled out of the boat and dies of an overdose.
“No wonder homeopathy is such big business. It’s every greedy capitalist’s wet dream. It costs next to nothing to produce, you can’t be held responsible if anything goes wrong, your customers will bend over backwards trying to give you credit for anything they can think of, and to top it all off, you get to pretend that the people selling real medicine are the greedy, immoral fuckers.”
That’s good. I’m shamelessly nicking it for use elsewhere..
Actually, since “like cures like”, wouldn’t massive amounts of water work as a cure for drowning?
No, no. The cure for drowning would be water diluted to nothing in…..water?
Holy shit, I’ve just come up with a new homeopathic drowning remedy: An empty bottle. If you fall in water, simply fill the bottle with water and dilute it with more water, shaking it between each step. When you’ve reached the proper dilution (10X for small ponds to 30X for oceans) drink the contents of the bottle and wait for rescue, secure in the knowledge that you can’t drown.
It works with salt water too, since the salt will also be homeopathically diluted and thus counteract the effects of the salt in the water. Incidentally, this also works as a method for making salt water drinkable in general.
I wonder, do homeopaths have rules for when water loses its magical abilities again? After all, the water from the remedies will eventually make it back to the general water supply. If the effect never goes away, the planet’s water will over time accumulate more and more medicinal effects. Are homeopaths ready to pay to clean up this environmental damage?
Do these people even spend five minutes thinking about how the world would really work if their ideas were true?
I made the mistake of buying something similar to this just a week or two ago when my asthma was acting up. For me, the labeling was a bit different and had the homeopathic wording on about 1/10 the font size on the back. Wasn’t until I sprayed it and it tasted like water that I looked a bit more closely. Luckily CVS let me return it, but it’s disappointing they sell this crap in the first place. I asked the pharmacist and he said that all actual rescue inhalers had been taken off the market because of the CFCs in them. This was in California, so not sure if that was state mandate or fed or just bullshit. I mainly just feel embarrassed for not noticing sooner.
A friend of mine bought something similar for treating a sore throat. I did convince her to just refill the bottle with tap water rather than buy another one.
It would be useful if we had a picture of the back/sides of the box to see what is being listed as “active ingredients” I agree homeopathy is for the most part woo and dangerous woo, but to get in an uproar over a front of a box without investigating what ingredients are actually in said remedy seems a little sensationalist and reactionary.
Ozymandus, if the product is actually homeopathic, it’s just water. There are no active ingredients.
But it is true that some companies label their products as homeopathic in order to avoid regulation. Then the problem is even worse: there’s little chance the product has any positive effect, but there is a chance it will have some nasty side effects. One fairly recent product to do this is Zicam, which destroys the nerves in a person’s nose, permanently reducing or eliminating their sense of smell.
If it’s homeopathic, it’s fraud (because it doesn’t work). If it isn’t homeopathic, it’s fraud (because it’s incorrectly labeled).
I would love to boycott pharmacies that sell crap like this…
… except I’m not sure there’s any left that don’t.
It’s really pretty icky, the way this has happened. How it’s become so normalized. Do the managers of this business feel any shame? Do the shareholders*? Do they care? It’s just business, now. The competition does it, so we do, too…
… oh, and I figure the odds there’s anything in it that box that has any kind of FDA-grade research attesting to its efficacy is about that of my winning the lottery*…
I mean, Oz, seriously. Allow me to read this, for you: it says ‘homeopathic’, and then it says ‘…for symptoms including shortness of breath, wheezing, and tightness in chest…’
Bit of a problem, there. The front of the box is really quite enough. Hell, it might even have been darkly funny, were it, say, a prop from a Mitchell and Webb skit. Absent this, it really just gets the dark part right.
(*/… and no, I don’t actually play the lottery. Not that this much affects the odds, when you think about it.)
Enginuiteer, they have replaced CFCs in rescue inhalers with HFAs, i.e. Ventolin HFA, Proventil HFA, ProAir HFA and Xopenex HFA. The FDA phased out CFC propelled albuterol sulfate or lavalbuterol tartrate MDIs by December 2008 in favour of ozone safe HFA propelled versions. Other no longer produced CFC propelled MDIs were phased out between June 2010 and December 2013.
Not that I don’t love a good pile-on of homeopathy, but the FDA qualification for homeopathic isn’t literally “contains no active ingredient”, it’s that items appear in the Homœopathic Pharmacopœia of the United States. That means you can have stuff like “Capsicum annuum 3X” or 0.1% chile pepper, as seen on this homeopathic inhaler label. Reading this abstract I see “Capsazepine, a compound derived from the active principle of hot pepper (Capsicum annuum), capsaicin, was found in this study to relax the constriction induced by several constricting agents in human small airway smooth muscle in vitro.” Assuming the Target brand is of similar composition, it’s possible that it’s not complete bottled woo. (May still be woefully ineffective, though there’s not really enough information here to be able to tell.)
If it contains an active ingredient, it shouldn’t be called homeopathic, because then it doesn’t rely on homeopathic mechanisms for its effect. Also, if it was a homeopathic remedy, then it should have the opposite effect
If the FDA calls that homeopathic, then the FDA has its head up its ass. This kind of bullshit only allows the scamsters to muddy the waters about what they’re actually selling. They might as well sell “homeopathic” penicillin and then use that as an argument for why homeopathy is effective.
After all, that’s what the acupuncture people regularly do. They routinely study things that aren’t actually acupuncture (but uses needles), and claim that as evidence for the efficacy of acupuncture.