Читать книгу Reversing Your Hair Loss - A Practical Scientific Guide - Robert J. Hall - Страница 5

Before reading the rest of this book, you need to understand the following information. Not just read it, but fully grasp what you are being told.

The hair-loss industry in the Western world alone is currently worth in excess of ten billion US dollars a year. And this is a very great deal of money. And all you have to do to get a slice of it is to tell a few lies that cannot be proven to be lies, or sell a product that cannot absolutely be proven to be useless. And this is exactly what happens, every day of the week, week in and week out.

Hair-loss companies and clinics will always want to be seen as reputable, honest, sincere and scientific ‘trichology clinics’ or some such similar type of establishment. It makes it much easier to part you from your money if you believe they know what they are talking about and can actually do something about your condition. Calling themselves ‘Vanity Hair Scams Ltd’ for instance would be very unlikely to achieve the same result.

However, you should understand that these clinics, their staff and their treatments are almost completely unregulated. In other words, no-one is on your side and no-one is looking out for you. Furthermore, never forget that despite reassuring you that your health and welfare are their prime concern the truth is that their only motive is profit and that, by making them any sort of approach, you immediately give yourself away as an easy target for them. They advertise themselves to you and you, in turn, unwittingly advertise yourself to them. You are in effect posting them a gilt-edged invitation to take money directly from your pocket with no concurrent guarantee of success or satisfaction.

This is not a case of a few charlatans putting on white coats and selling bottles of home-made snake oil from the back of the modern-day equivalent of a horse and cart. This whole criminal charade involves the pharmaceutical industry, government agencies, private clinics and university-level educational institutes.

All is not lost, though. This is because there are in existence home treatments that will do the same as commercial cutting edge treatments and have been known to do so for years. The purpose of this book is to bring them to your attention and delineate between those that work and those that do not. Some treatments will fall between these two positions and achieve somewhat limited success; but, in each case, where there are undesirable side effects, these will be strongly highlighted.

Having said this, virtually all the home therapies, supplements, protocols and equipment outlined in this book will have attached to them negative reviews and cautions by apparently knowledgeable and reputable third parties. Rather than take any such reviews at face value, however, you should bear the following points in mind at all times.

The first thing you should understand is that unless specific figures are given, with specific, checkable references attached to them, you should not attach much weight, if any, to any alleged side effect. In any court of law such evidence would be inadmissible; classed as simple ‘hearsay’. The qualification of the person reporting the alleged shortcomings of a supplement may be suspect. They may be connected with the pharmaceutical industry, the regulatory authorities, or a just a commercial competitor. Without comprehensive substantiation any reported ‘fact’ can only be treated with grave suspicion. Even in regular, informal conversation, how much credibility is ever really attached to something a friend of a friend said? The answer is, of course, very little.

The second thing that you should give absolutely no weight to is any statement that says anything along the lines of ‘no clinical trials have taken place’, or, ‘has yet to be proven’ etc. Although quite possibly true, these statements lack something that, again, would render them inadmissible as evidence in court. What they lack is proper context, and it is this consideration that prompts courts to demand that you tell the whole truth and not just the selections that the prosecution would like the jury to hear.

Since the whole story has not been told the fact that clinical trials have not taken place and the statements pointing out that fact are misleading. In other words the truth has been turned into a lie.

The reason why no clinical trials have been done, nor ever will be done, on a substance called polysorbate, for instance, is that such trials are expensive. However, even if it were known that the trials would prove to be a fabulous success, with those using polysorbate suddenly finding their hair growing to such an extent that they needed to get their hair cut once a fortnight, this expense still forms the one overriding reason why they would not be undertaken.

The problem is that polysorbate is a natural product and cannot, therefore, be patented. This fact alone ensures that polysorbate will never be clinically tested in any commercial setting. Why not? Well, because it cannot be patented there would be absolutely no chance of those commissioning the trials recouping their expenses. All that would happen is that they would have armed their sales department as well as that of their competitors with extra information and brighter sales prospects. These competitors would then be in a better position than the funding company financially, of course, because, unlike them, they did not spend their money on the trials.

Put very simply, any company that funded any clinical trials would suddenly start losing the commercial war with its rivals. It would, in all probability, be the last mistake the company’s board ever made because the company would go into liquidation within months. It is precisely because of this inescapable economic law that the patent process and intellectual property laws were devised.

Lastly, the third thing generally missing from the portfolio of evidence against any particular therapy is the comparative weight of all the relevant risks. They get ignored. For example, if someone told you that they were worried about the cancer risk from eating bread crusts (and studies have been carried out on exactly this topic) then they are clearly obsessively micro-managing a virtually non-existent problem. This is not to say that the risk is not there, that it is not quantifiable and that it is not possible to do anything about it (there is - do not eat bread crusts, obviously). What needs to be understood, however, is that the risk exists at about the same magnitude, say, as getting cancer from fluorescent tube lighting; it is possible, but not very probable (studies on this scenario have also been undertaken incidentally).

The sensible approach is to match the scare level of the item under study with other known and quantified similar risks and then compare the two. Studies like the two just mentioned generate research funds by deliberately omitting such comparisons. Compare the cancer risk of tube lighting with that of spending even a day at the seaside on a bright summer’s day in England. The comparative risk is negligible to say the least. If, however, the comparison between these risks is left out of the equation, then you could quite truthfully and no doubt very regretfully report to the world at large that eating bread crusts causes cancer, just as sitting underneath a fluorescent tube does.

But surely, you might say, some of these studies are carried out by universities and so must be credible? Possibly they are; on the other hand, university studies are often funded by big companies and this one fact alone make them entirely suspect. It always pays to check whether the department or academic making the announcement has received funding from outside sources.

Let us suppose they are not, however, and the university has independent funding. You still need to understand that competition exists for these monies. University research funds are not limitless pots of gold and competition for the money exists. The findings of any study may well therefore be skewed in order to secure more funding for yet more research. How does this happen? Well, no-one will fund a study to prove that vitamin C cures scurvy; it is already public knowledge. On the other hand, reporting precisely the opposite might draw monies from a funding panel anxious to put their department at the centre of the academic map.

With specific regard to polysorbate, you would see from any investigation into it that, despite reams of anecdotal evidence from users, personal testimonies and letters from patients’ own doctors attesting to improvements, no notice was ever taken. Empirical evidence (which is the bedrock of all science) was simply ignored in favour of a legalistic manoeuvre used to block the sale and promotion of the substance. Inconvenient empirical evidence is often dismissed as being evidence of a simple placebo effect in situations like this. This position might have some merit but for one completely contrary fact. Animals responded to polysorbate as well as humans. In fact, it was the initial results from animal trials that prompted the human experiments.

This book goes into the details of polysorbate treatment in a later chapter. For the moment, however, just quietly consider the following facts.

Polysorbate is an extremely safe, natural substance. So safe, in fact, that it is actually used as an edible ingredient in the food industry. You do not need a special license or prescription to buy it, sell it, store it or use it. You could easily buy a fifty-gallon drum of the stuff and store it under your bed if you so wished. If it were suggested, then, that there might be some benefit obtainable by simply rubbing it on your head and then rinsing it off you might wonder what possible grounds for objection there could be. But objections there were.

Those objections stemmed from one single principal source; the US pharmaceutical industry. They raised the matter with the FDA (the Food and Drug Administration agency of the US). Between them they then involved the US Postal Service (which is prohibited by US law from being used to perpetuate financial frauds). With this there then began an unceasing campaign to prevent people rubbing this stuff onto their heads. The issue eventually went to court in 1992.

At this trial there were personal testimonies from 107 people who could prove that polysorbate reversed their hair-loss. Clinical data was presented. Pictures were produced, third-party testimonies were offered and letters from doctors were produced. The prosecutor, on the other hand, could not find one expert witness to prove they were liars. Nor could the prosecutor find one single expert witness able to prove the practice was harmful. Nonetheless, the pharmaceutical companies won the day and it became illegal thereafter to make any claim regarding polysorbate’s hair-restoring properties.

How exactly did this come about?

Victory was secured for the pharmaceutical companies because they claimed that polysorbate was being marketed as a hair-restoring drug without FDA approval. FDA approval was not granted because, of course, no clinical trials had taken place. It is not the FDA’s role to carry out such trials, nor is it the court’s role to determine whether such trials should actually take place. The only body that could have conducted such trials would be the pharmaceutical companies of course; the very people that not only declined to carry out any such trials in the first place but also initiated legal action in the second.

What you need to understand is that the absence of this material from the market place benefited no-one except the pharmaceutical companies because, in common with all natural cures and practices, it competed with their commercial products. In other words, it damaged their sales targets, their profit margins and their share price. Now, if you extrapolate the position with polysorbate to cover all such therapies, you will begin to grasp the scale of the deception.

You have been forewarned and are thus also now forearmed.