Conspiracy theories and snake oil, the perfect pair

Why on earth would people rely on a conspiracy theorist, someone with only a high school education, for medical or health advice? And yet, some people do.

Alex Jones, the far-right conspiracy theorist who runs the Infowars radio program and website, was temporarily suspended by Twitter this week, following bans by Apple, YouTube, and Facebook. These social media companies banned him for repeatedly violating their rules about hate speech and inciting violence. Among other notorious claims, Jones has falsely claimed that children murdered in the mass shooting in Sandy Hook were just actors and that their parents faked their deaths.

What many people don't know, though, is that Jones also runs a dietary supplement business from his Infowars site. Despite reports that Jones' supplements are little more than "overpriced, mundane vitamins," his supplement sales seem to be quite profitable–so much so, in fact, that Buzzfeed reported that the supplement business "largely funds Jones' highly controversial Infowars media empire."

I was curious to see what Jones was selling, so I looked at his Infowars web store. It features an array of products with names like:

• Brain Force Plus
• Super Male Vitality
• The Real Red Pill, DNA Force, and more

Each of these products is marketed with breathless claims for what it can do, including testimonials from Jones himself. For example, Brain Force Plus claims to "supercharge your state of mind," and Jones plugs it with this quote:

"This is what I take before a hard-hitting show. I absolutely love it, and the crew does too. This stuff is over the top powerful!"

Well then. Never mind that Brain Force is really just a collection of herbal extracts and vitamin B-12, none of them proven to "supercharge" your mind or any other body part.

In a similar vein, Jones hypes Super Male Vitality with this claim:

"This product works so well for me that I actually had to stop taking it before I go on air or else I would want to do hours and hours of overdrive with complete focus on the topics at hand."

From the name, you might guess that Super Male Vitality has something to do with testosterone, and the website does state that it "may help support normal testosterone levels in men." What's in it? A collection of plant extracts, none of them proven to maintain or increase testosterone or to have any actual medical benefit.

Of course, if you follow the asterisks on both of these pages and read further down, you'll see that

"These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease."

This statement is the standard disclaimer that supplement manufacturers make in order to avoid FDA oversight. There's no actual scientific evidence (and Jones's Infowars pages don't attempt to cite any) that these products do what the text on the very same page says they do. You just have to take Jones' word for it.

This is pure snake oil. That shouldn't be surprising, not coming from a man who has accused grieving parents of faking their children's deaths, and who claims the U.S. government was behind the 9/11 attacks. It's hard to understand why anyone believes any of the outrageous claims this guy makes, and especially bewildering that people who trust him to advise them on health and diet. His supplements aren't even a good buy, as Buzzfeed reported a year ago. All I can say is, caveat emptor.

Get your wolfsbane here! Cures headaches, only $16 a bottle

Homeopathic drugs contain some pretty strange ingredients. These drugs (or perhaps I should call them potions) come in ordinary-looking packages, apparently designed to look just like real medicine, but they are not. Inside the bottles are concoctions of a wide variety of plant extracts and other substances, almost none of them effective for what’s written on the package.

This week I was browing the headache remedies at CVS, and I encountered a treatment I hadn’t seen before: Nova Headache Complex. It’s an expensive homeopathic remedy, advertised at $16.29 for a 50-ml bottle.

Because homeopaths and their treaments are unregulated, Nova can sell this stuff without having to prove that it has any effect at all on headaches. We can thank Congress for that: ever since 1938, when a homeopathic member of Congress passed the first law protecting them, homeopathic manufacturers have been allowed to forgo any testing to show that their products are safe and effective. And who decides what is homeopathic? The homeopaths themselves.

So: what does Nova’s Headache Complex contain? According to the package, it contains Aconitum Napellus 12X, Bryonia 12X, Cactus Grandiflorus 4X, Chelidonium Majus 6X, Cimicifuga Racemosa 6X, Sanguinaria Canadensis 6X, Spigelis Anthelmia 6X, Thuja Occidentalis 6X. Let's look at just the first of these.

Wolfsbane flowers

Aconitum napellus is a lovely flowering plant, commonly known as monk’s hood or wolfsbane. If that sounds ominous, it should: wolfsbane contains several highly poisonous compounds. It's listed at #3 in the top 10 deadliest plants at Zitbits, which explains:

"When ingested, an intense burning feeling in the limbs and abdomen is immediately felt. In large doses, death can occur in as little as 2-6 hours. Only 20ml of pseudaconitine is needed to kill an adult human. Its name comes the mythology that it was thought to keep away werewolves, hence ‘wolfsbane’."

Wolfsbane has been used as a poison for thousands of years, going back to Roman times. Many young readers will remember it as the main ingredient in a deadly potion in the Harry Potter books. Coincidentally, exactly one year ago, a gardener in England died after accidentally brushing against some wolfsbane flowers.

Yikes! How can they sell this stuff? Well, luckily for consumers, the 12X refers to an extreme dilution, in this instance equal to 10 raised to the 12th power, or 1 part in 1 trillion. The only reason people don’t die when they take Nova's Headache Complex is that there’s essentially no wolfsbane in it.

Fortunately, most homeopathic “drugs” don’t contain any measurable amount of their active ingredients. That’s because homeopaths think that the more you dilute a substance–even to the point where not a single molecule remains–the more potent it is. This laughably foolish notion flies in the face of modern chemistry, biology, and physics, but homeopaths believe it anyway.

What about the other ingredients? All of them are plant extracts, several of them also poisonous (including black cohosh and bloodroot). To avoid extending this discussion for many more pages, suffice it to say that none of these plants have been shown scientifically to cure headaches.

Nova Headache Complex does contain one real ingredient: 20% alcohol. That’s quite a lot, much stronger than beer or wine. Slate.com's Yvette d'Entremont demonstrated on YouTube how one can easily get drunk from a few bottles of these homeopathic products. (She used CVS's homeopathic constipation cure, which fortunately has no effect at all on constipation.) This revelation prompted NBC4 in Los Angeles to investigate why CVS was selling alcohol to minors.

Back to our headache "cure": fortunately, over-the-counter medicines such as ibuprofen, aspirin, and acetaminophen work very well for most people. If none of these work for you, drinking an alcohol solution laced with wolfsbane (or, to be more accurate, laced with nothing) won’t help either.

The FDA is currently considering whether or not to modernize its regulation of homeopathic remedies. They’ve held a hearing and solicited public comments. Interesting, the Federal Trade Commission weighed in, arguing that the FDA's current lax rules “may harm consumers and create confusion for advertisers.” I’m skeptical that the FDA will step in any time soon, but one can always hope.

Meanwhile, CVS will sell you wolfsbane for headache pain, but I hope that none of the bottles contain the deadly poisons listed on the label. If nothing else, at least you get a shot of overpriced alcohol.