There is nothing too remarkable about the Finchley Clinic in London. Apart that it is not really a clinic as you might understand the word. It is run by a chap called Mark Lester who apparently used to offer a number of questionable alternative medicine therapies, including ozone therapy, bowen therapy and very unorthodox tests such as Rife machine and something called electro-crystal therapy. These days, the Finchley Clinic just runs an online web store selling vitamin pills and supplements. There is nothing unusual there: it is much like the dozens of other similar pill sites you can find.

One thing that does appear to be unique is it is the only place I can find that sells a pill called Triamazon. The site claims that Triamazon is a “a specialised formulated pharmaceuticaly graded selection of plant derived phytochemicals, alkaloids and acetogenins”. We are warned that, “It is not provided to treat, cure or prevent any disease, and should not be used to replace any medical treatment which has been recommended or is being received.” One has to wonder just what this product is for.

But again, sites selling pills and not making any specific claims for them again is not unusual. Triamazon is just a food supplement after all.

What is a little unusual is that the sole importer and supplier of Triamazon that I know of has this week pleaded guilty in Manchester’s Minshull Street Crown Court of importing, possession, supply and sale of a medicinal product without a license. Andrew Harris had stood trial after originally pleading not guilty, but after a few days in court and just before he was about to give evidence, he changed his plea saying, “Due to a technicality in law pointed out to me, I now plead guilty.” Presumably that technicality was that he was guilty.

Andrew Harris’s appearance in court was not too unusual as well in that a few years ago he was found guilty under the Cancer Act of 1939 after advertising Triamazon as a cancer cure. Harris was arrested after dawn raids on his address following investigation by Trading Standards and the MHRA that he was selling Triamazon from his own web sites, including www.thiskillscancer.com and triamazon.com, and making unsubstantiated claims that these pills could cure cancer. He was given a two year conditional discharge and ordered to pay costs of £350.

Since then, his site Triamazon.com has not been offering the pills for sale. Instead, the site has been making all sorts of wild claims for the health benefits of the product and appeals for the Cancer Act to be repealed. Visitors are directed to the Finchley clinic if they want to buy some. This arrangement means that everything now is pretty much legal. Harris is perfectly entitled to have a web site and spout any sort of nonsense about Triamazon he wants to. The Finchley Clinic is perfectly entitled to sell this ‘food supplement’ as long as it is not making medicinal claims.

Harris was not on trial because of what he says on his web site. It looks like a MRHA officer telephoned him directly and asked to buy some pills. He confirmed who he was, and supplied the pills with his return address on it. If Mr Harris had been ever so slightly more on the ball and refused to sell the product, but instead said he knew a site that did sell Triamazon, then it is unlikely that he would now find himself facing sentencing in a couple of weeks.

Before we move on it might be worth looking quickly at what Triamazon is. It looks like the pills are just a branded form of graviola, also known as Soursop – a tropical evergreen plant with big pawpaw like fruit. There are all sorts of claims out there on the web for the miraculous properties of graviola – and you can find tubs of pills derived from the fruit for a few quid. Mr Harris was selling his branded version for £250, with customers ‘requiring’ a course of two tubs.

Cancer Research UK tell us that there has been some test tube work on graviola showing that it can kill cancer cells. No human testing has ever been done. As such, graviola joins a long line of substances that can kill cancer cells in a test tube: you can tip vodka on cancer cells and they will die – this does not mean vodka is a cure for cancer. Cancer Research UK says, “We do not support the use of graviola to treat cancer. Our advice is to be very cautious about believing information or paying for any type of alternative cancer therapy on the internet”. They also warn that graviola has been shown to cause nerve damage and lead to symptoms like Parkinson’s disease.

The Finchley Clinic helpfully tells customers that they are “not associated with any company, web site or individual making medical claims of any description for this product.” This statement is somewhat undermined when they go on to state that they have been in contact with the suppliers to ask why it is so expensive. Quite fairly, they say,

It is not our intention to exploit customers, and please rest assured that we do not supply Triamazon with artificially raised margins compared with our other products.

Unfortunately our attempts to find out why Triamazon is so dear have not been terribly successful. We did ask the supplier, but we didn’t get an especially helpful reply.  Their main reply was to advise us to ask the drug companies why their drugs are so expensive (which was a perfectly legitimate question, but somewhat off the subject), along with this link to an article about the pharmaceutical companies unethical practices…

There then is a link to a Daily Mail article.

The clinic shows the product label which clearly directs punters back to Triamazon.com if they want to know about the medical research information regarding the product.

None of this is unusual. And perhaps it is quite unfair to focus on this example as the whole vitamin and food supplement pill is based on the same simple trick: separate web sites for medical claims and sales. Mainstream pill and potion sellers like Patrick Holford and Gillian McKeith have their own web sites, members clubs, books and conferences that can quite legitimately make all sorts of health claims, but do not attempt to sell products to you. Other channels do that – and these sites and stores do not make health claims. It is not just characters like these. The big High Street chains thrive off the same practice, but here they tend to rely on enough wild information being out of the web generically for various products to be sold. Chains like Boots or Holland and Barrett do not need to make fantastical claims for food supplements when the web is choc-a-bloc with nonsense. These companies, they say, are just meeting a demand: a demand often driven by fantastical and unevidenced claims from crank web sites. Julian Graves were selling apricot kernels recently – a bitter and poisonous seed – and directing customers to ‘look on the web’ to find out what claims were being made for them. In this case, apricot kernels are touted as a cancer cure despite their very poisonous nature. These are not small companies, but part of multi-billion dollar multinationals.

By ensuring claims are separate from sales, legal issues can be side stepped. Despite the fact that so many so called food supplements appear to have no specific benefits outside of the whacky world of the web, companies like Boots and Holland & Barrett are quite happy to have shelves and shelves of the useless tubs lined up. To me, the issue looks like quite a difficult one to solve. For example, if you sell Vitamin C in quantities of 50mg, then they can be sold quite legitimately as a food supplement for people who may not be getting enough got whatever reason. But sell Vitamin C in 1000mg and higher and people will be just producing expensive urine with it. High dose vitamin C has moved into quack claim territory and is only really being sold when people are misinformed.

New EU laws may well make such large dose vitamin pills hard to sell. But products like Triamazon are not vitamins. I think what may be required is for the onus to be on sellers to demonstrate that their products can be used as genuine food supplements, for that is how they are being sold. At the moment, the only reason someone might buy a product like Triamazon is if they have been misled into believing that it can help treat cancer – it is not a food supplement, and no-one will buy it as such, despite it being sold as one.

This too would go for a whole host of products currently lining shelves in the High Street, from shark cartilage pills to megadose vitamins.

Trading Standards laws already in place should be sufficient to enforce this. What is lacking at the moment is awareness and training within Trading Standards groups of the issues and how to assess medical claims. If Mr Harris had not made his telephone sales slip up, then there may well have been many people buying these expensive pills under the false hope that they could cure terminal illnesses.

Related posts:

1. Triamazon Cancer Pill Scam Busted You know, I do not believe that most of the people that feature on this site are fraudsters. No, the truth is far worse than that – most homeopaths,...
2. Google Advertises Busted Triamazon Cancer Cure After yesterday’s raids by the MHRA on suspect dodgy pill sellers and their ‘Internet Day of Action’, perhaps one of the largest profiteers from such schemes will get away with...
3. Triamazon Man Convicted You may remember in January that I reported how dawn raids had been conducted on the house of a man selling a quack remedy called Triamazon. Well, today the BBC...

Clearly, Harris believes some sort of miscariage of justice has taken place and his human rights have been abused. Quite what rights have been trampled upon is not clear. Telephone numbers and email addresses are still on the site asking for people to contact him. The rest of the site is still up with all the old claims being made (see here). I am not a legal expert, but my best guess would be that this would be in breach of the conditions of discharge.

The Manchester Evening News reports an interview with Harris…

“I would like to see the drug made be available to all cancer patients and discrimination against alternative medicine ended. I have been branded a charlatan for no reason. The case has ruined my life.“

Related posts:

1. Triamazon Cancer Pill Scam Busted You know, I do not believe that most of the people that feature on this site are fraudsters. No, the truth is far worse than that – most homeopaths,...
2. Google Advertises Busted Triamazon Cancer Cure After yesterday’s raids by the MHRA on suspect dodgy pill sellers and their ‘Internet Day of Action’, perhaps one of the largest profiteers from such schemes will get away with...
3. The Finchley Clinic, Triamazon and the Law. There is nothing too remarkable about the Finchley Clinic in London. Apart that it is not really a clinic as you might understand the word. It is run by...

Google has been quite happy to take money from triamazon.com to show adverts for the site and the hugely overpriced food supplement pretending to be a miracle cancer cure.

This is despite the fact that Google has a clear policy that it will not do such things. As part of its advertising terms it says that it will not take adverts for:

Miracle Cures
Advertising is not permitted for the promotion of miracle cures, such as ‘Cure cancer overnight!’

Furthermore, by taking money for such adverts, Google will be in contravention of the Cancer Act of 1939 which says,

No person shall take any part in the publication of any advertisement—

containing an offer to treat any person for cancer, or to prescribe any remedy therefor, or to give any advice in connection with the treatment thereof

People do get prosecuted under the terms of this Act. Trading Standards have a duty to enforce it. However, as Trading Standards tend to be highly fragmented across local councils, none of them appear to want to take on the Google giant. I believe Westminster Trading Standards as their UK address is given as,

Google UK Ltd
Belgrave House
76 Buckingham Palace Road
London
SW1W 9TQ
United Kingdom
Phone: +44 (0)20-7031-3000
Fax: +44 (0)20-7031-3001

However, Westminster undoubtedly have many higher priorities making sure dodgy plumbers do not rip off senile old ladies who live on Buckingham Palace Road.

I have complained to Google before about similar issues and also to Trading Standards. Ignored, so far. Google should be policing their own noble ‘do no evil’ terms, and if they cannot they should be prosecuted where they flout the law. Perhaps the MHRA, as part of their Internet day of action, could tackle one of the largest advertisers on the web. Google has the power to make or break such companies. The MHRA ought to be concerned.

Related posts:

1. Triamazon Cancer Pill Scam Busted You know, I do not believe that most of the people that feature on this site are fraudsters. No, the truth is far worse than that – most homeopaths,...
2. Google ‘Sees no Evil’ Once upon a time, back in the olden days, that is, before 1996 or thereabouts, your typical quack was faced with a big problem. Just as with producing software,...
3. Triamazon Man Convicted You may remember in January that I reported how dawn raids had been conducted on the house of a man selling a quack remedy called Triamazon. Well, today the BBC...

I have been keeping an eye on Andrew Harris and his site http://www.triamazon.com/ for six months or more. He also uses a site called http://www.thiskillscancer.com/. Apaprently, Triamazon is a,

NATURAL SCIENCE PROVEN SAFE NON-TOXIC product that is effective against many cancers and is also far superior to chemotherapy as it does not harm healthy cells.

Harris sells ‘half a course’ of 100 pills of Triamazon for about £250 a bottle from his home in Altrincham. He says,

Skeptics please see… The official independent “Research White Paper” on the proven effectiveness of selected Acetogenins, by clicking on this link below… http://www.iupac.org/publications/pac/2003/pdf/7502×0259.pdf

Clicking through to this paper reveals information about the synthesis of acetogenins. Nothing about clinical efficacy. The Alliance for Natural Health issued a warning saying that the pill was Graviola (Annona muricata). You can buy Graviola tubs for about £20 or less if you look.

Just about every day I have been getting Google alerts for triamazon as it has been advertised around the web on bulletin boards, chat rooms and in press releases. Typically, such messages say things like:

Andrew Harris an ex-cancer patient exposes the big pharma industry cover-up of a natural cancer killing miracle with astounding incriminating conclusive independent evidence available via a direct link to pubmed archives on his website. Andrew is the founder of www.thiskillscancer.com His strong entrepreneurial background in business, marketing, research and management is combined with his personal experiences in having gone through 14 lots of conventional toxic combination chemotherapy to actually surviving cancer through an alternative natural, non toxic, immune system boosting, cancer killing miracle.

Leaving aside the issue of whether triamazon can do anything for cancer, advertising cancer cures is illegal in the UK under the Cancer Act of 1939. Trading Standards are tasked with upholding this act and have been aware of Triamazon for many months now. Indeed, Andrew Harris has been aware of it too as his web site has, at times, appeared with a disclaimer that his site was intended for doctors only – an attempt to wriggle out of the Cancer Act’s glare. It was not fooling anyone.

Yesterday, at 7.30 am a house in Sale was visited by Trading Standards, the MRHA and the Police and the raid seized ‘quantities of an unregistered drug called Triamazon’ and a 48 year old was arrested. The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) have teamed up with police to take part in a number of dawn raids around the country as part of an ‘Internet day of action’.

It has been slow, but it is good to see that existing legislation can deal with some of the worst sorts of quackery out there. Taking money from desperate and scared people in exchange for worthless pills, has to rank amongst some of the lowest scams imaginable.

If you see similar sorts of things on the web, the Consumer Direct site is a pretty good place to start.

*************************************************************************

The Mirror Now Cover this too:

Police swoop on cruel internet cancer “cure” pill conmen

Related posts:

1. Google Advertises Busted Triamazon Cancer Cure After yesterday’s raids by the MHRA on suspect dodgy pill sellers and their ‘Internet Day of Action’, perhaps one of the largest profiteers from such schemes will get away with...
2. Triamazon Man Convicted You may remember in January that I reported how dawn raids had been conducted on the house of a man selling a quack remedy called Triamazon. Well, today the BBC...
3. The Finchley Clinic, Triamazon and the Law. There is nothing too remarkable about the Finchley Clinic in London. Apart that it is not really a clinic as you might understand the word. It is run by...