Where is the TGA when you need it?

1 minute read

podcast TGA The Tea Room

By

Francine Crimmins

We scope out the offerings at the 2021 MindBodySpirit Festival.

The MindBodySpirit Festival touts itself as “Australia’s largest health & wellbeing event”.

Attendees are invited to “see over 200 experts, attend seminars, see a psychic, meditate and more!”

This episode we head down to the festival to see the range of woo on offer and how many ‘health’ claims vendors can make without interference from the Therapeutic Goods Administration.

This episode features Richard Saunders from the Australian Skeptics and Adjunct Professor Ken Harvey, a public health physician with an interest in the regulation of therapeutic goods.

You can listen and subscribe to the show by searching for “The Tea Room Medical Republic” in your favourite podcast player.

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Anon
Anon
3 years ago

Since when is it appropriate to give bandwidth to the Australian Skeptic Society in a medical journal?
Where is the fairness in that?
It’s not up to us (medicos) or the TGA to impose our belief systems on others.
You exhibit a one sided biased view which alienates our profession.
Who are we to play “God” and start judging what others choose to do or believe?
Get a grip!

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John Dirasa
John Dirasa
Reply to  Anon
3 years ago

Science and evidence doesn’t care what you believe. Unless of course your goal is to just make money off of naive vulnerable people with non evidence based products or services.

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Stephen Scholem
Stephen Scholem
3 years ago

Guest : The Australian Skeptic Society is a very appropriate organisation to get input from as they are totally evidence based and many members are medical doctors and scientists. They are not imposing their beliefs on anyone or playing God – in this case they are just trying to save people from wasting their money.

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Anke
Anke
3 years ago

I agree with the notion that it is unethical to advertise false promises and claims of cures that aren’t replicable in more than half of cases and exploit hope.
Yet what is a false promise for one may not be for another.
Sceptics unfortunately can’t benefit from the placebo effect. How high is the placebo rate for the common antihypertensives for example? (Placebo in Beta blocker trial – JAmSocHypert Dec2016 was systBP 34% and diastBP47%)!
What is placebo effect?
It is a powerful message to the brain produced from self suggestion/ belief, the suggestion of another person ( into a procedure /product)
= words as linguistic energy/ waves or whatever you want to call it) to cause a specific effect without any evidence of a causative agent.

We all except readily that the mental effect of a verbally abusive parent can change the production of hormons in the brain and over time cause an imbalance and depression. Just because we can ‘hear’ those frequencies doesn’t make them more powerful than the ones we can’t hear or perceive with any other human organ/ receptor
So how do cruel words over time change/ influence the cells to not function or respond to a hormon?
Linguists have found that the use of ‘l’ or ‘m’ words causes the brain to produce oxytocin which makes a person feel well, accepted and bonded ( like lullaby, mama) whereas if you use ‘s’ or ‘k’ words the opposite occurs. But what about stimuli we have not examined for their resposes to our cells in body or brain?

Sceptics forget that a human being is after all atoms/ molecules with millenia of memory and we therefore all react with and to our environment which includes the atoms and molecules in the air we breathe, the food we eat/ drink, the products we put in or on our skin, hair etc But we also react with and to invisible forces , energies like waves, magnetic, lunar or otherwise (including mental energy used in Reiki for example) as they influence how cells built of those atoms function.
Is everything we can’t logically explain bogus?
It’s short sighted!
Whether doctor, nurse or non-medical person show respect for the third dimension of a being: the spiritual. When we all start to accept we’re more than biological robots we won’t despair of intuition/ gut feelings and healing powers exerted from hypnosis, homoepathy, crystals etc even if they can’t be fathomed by logic or a human brain.

I recommend for all sceptics to read Osho and grow more wholesome with each other and the universe.

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John Dirasa
John Dirasa
3 years ago

Amazing investigative journalism! Can we please focus more on this topic with more news, petitions etc. The non-evidence based practitioners of woo are getting out of control in this country, especially since the pandemic!!

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Justin Coleman
Justin Coleman
3 years ago

That was an entertaining podcast, thanks Francine.
Lovely to see a bit of polite common sense applied to the many outrageous claims. Not playing ‘God’: just a mild voice of reason.
Anke there are so many pseudoscientific notions within your response that every paragraph becomes its own moving target, particularly when it comes to your extrapolation of the placebo effect.
However, I heartily agree with your first sentence (except for the bit about ‘half of cases’).
Cheers, Justin

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