The Fast Health Scam Detection Guidelines (FHSDGs) 2.0
A time saving approach for the rest of us.
I’m going to be on a plane flying back from Japan today, so this recycled column will be a hit with the several thousand people who read this now who didn’t read the newsletter back when this was published. So much has happened since then. For example, there was an election. And an investigation was launched into UnitedHealth Group for fraudulent billing of Medicare advantage by the DOJ. Word on the street (by this I mean TikTok) is that specific internal communications were issued about my reporting in specific—they told their employees I was fake news!—before being contacted by media sources and not being able to do denying any of my reporting. The offered buyouts to 30,000 Employees. This is sort of a step in the right direction. Let me explain.
Ironically, UnitedHealth Group has bent to my will in one tiny way, and started reporting actual layoffs to the federal Warn Act Database again—they reported some of this round of layoffs in California to WARN. For this pro-compliance stance they should be commended. Good job UHG! I'm not being sarcastic. I really think this is exactly the kind of behavior on the part of a major corporation I was advocating for, so today, I say—Sir Andrew Witty, CEO, good work. I think your compliance with relevant rules and regulations is right on.
Even critics as vociferous as myself should be able to complement those change in a positive direction. Today, I raise my glass. Good work!
Now, having run out of kvetching and compliments, I present an older classic. Medical directors at health plans are asked to pay for treatments all the time. Many are not worth the money. Some are highly dubious. The following article is for my health plan employed colleagues (and general audiences) who are being asked to differentiate fact from fiction. This article is designed to save you time by untangling facts from fiction —fast.
I got an email from a colleague today asking me what I thought about a “healthcare product.” I figured instead of just a quick email back, I could explain to everybody how I look at new innovations in healthcare, and try to determine if what I’m looking at is real or fake—and this time I’m only going to use the website!
Welcome to my shortcuts to save time—because there’s a lot more fake than real out there.
The product I was asked to take a look at is the following:
For starters, there is some skepticism. But I’m an MD who uses medical grade energy healing regularly. I know the future can look suspicious but turn out to be real. And too much mistrust isn’t better than too little. It’s about a Goldilocks level of curiosity. So let’s dig deeper:
So, it gets a lot more suspect here. Keep in mind; I’ve never seen this product before. But a few issues jump out:
I’ve never seen a medical product with the word “or” in reference to FDA approval
“HAPPY HORMONES” seems like fishy wording
Actual medical devices rarely use words like “BALANCE”. That is a pseudoscience word.
FDA approval is for pharmacological agents and brand new (“de novo”) for devices. Most devices get FDA clearance, which is different from a regulatory perspective, but importantly, for general audiences, using the word “approved” in advertising for a device makes me worry it’s a scam.
Again, I still don’t know. Let’s keep scrolling:
Now, I don’t disagree with Albert Einstein, generally. To be honest, he and I don’t have a lot of back-and-forth. Mostly it’s because he’s dead. But it’s also because he’s a physicist. So he rarely said anything about medicine that lands on my desk. I don’t have a whole lot to say about general relativity or special relativity on the daily. I do know that, because he is dead, he is unlikely to be able to bring a legal case against someone for quoting him inaccurately! He’s got a really strong personal brand for being smart, so I can understand why an advertiser would use a quote from him.
Onward!
Things that are actually science don’t need to say “backed by science”. They are just science. Let’s look at just the names of subjects you take classes in to go to medical school:
Physics
Biology
Chemistry
English
Organic Chemistry
Calculus
Here is a list of not-necessary course work:
Political Science
Christian Science
Computer Science
Climate Science
Which is not to comment on ironclad-ness of this heuristic! But you can see that naming conventions are pretty helpful, but not perfectly helpful.
Let’s take a quick peek an actual medical device company website:
Magnus Medical, you are up.
Here we kinda still can’t tell…but medical devices are highly regulated, so the language is gonna drip “boring lawyer” tone!
“Restore healthy neural activity”—it’s not clear to me if this is language designed to make sense to the general public or hand-waving. Context matters!
“Relieve symptoms of depression”—sounds like a lawyer was all over this!
Wait list? Why aren’t they selling it now? Oh, cause regulators take a long time! Point in the “real” column!
Back to pseudoscientific nonsense detector mode:
How many doctors do you know who endorse medical products by saying “we’ve been doing trials on ourselves?” The plural of anecdote is profitable scam, not evidence.
Now, the irony is there’s a lot of medical innovation—Nobel-prize-in-medicine-level innovation—that has come from this very approach. The discovery of Helicobacter pylori as the cause of gastric ulcers in humans was as a result of the doctor doing this to himself. But the kind of doctor matters…gonna repeat that:
But the kind of doctor matters:
And this company spokeshuman is a naturopathic physician. I’m not saying he’s wrong. I’m “just asking questions”: Why didn’t they get a medical doctor? Because they’ve got a white guy with a stethoscope. Good enough.
Let’s compare to what I know to be a real medical device company.
Now, pretending I don’t actually know these guys, I see a PhD and I’m suspicious. I’m suspicious because a lot of people can get have a fake PhD. A lot of people can actually have a PhD and have it not add a lot of scientific credibility too. Anyone with a PhD does have listed a number of other fact-checkable things, but that takes time. I am trying to figure out if it’s BS just from the website. Who is next?
Medical degrees are a lot harder to fake. Medical doctors have national provider identification numbers, they have DEA registrations, they have all sorts of things that make it easy to figure out if they are real or not. And I recognize Stanford1. And I trust Stanford would probably sue somebody who said they went to Stanford if they didn’t. But again, I’m trying to save time here, and so I’m not gonna verify any of this, I’m just going with my brain to figure out if this is a lie.
Let’s take a look at who they have quoted on the website:
Patrick Kennedy. He’s alive. He can file a lawsuit. Precise patterns of stimulation. This also sounds like something a lawyer vetted. It sounds like they’re trying really hard to say only very careful things. No cures are promised, and “depressive symptoms” decreasing means it’s something that a lawyer had to look at because depression is a disease, so this is clearly something that’s super regulated.
How about the neurowrap?
Wow, they hid that at the bottom? If this is really a medical anything, it wouldn’t say that.
Do you spend all this time talking about the health benefits of something that isn’t intended to have an impact on diseases? Yes. If you’re trying to just sell something that’s a scam, that’s exactly what you do.
Hey—it’s direct to consumer with a glowing USD currency selector! No, not all direct consumer health technology is a scam. But non-direct-to-consumer health technology is less likely to be a scam in my brain—just because of the expense of getting that sort of thing to market and over all those regulatory hurdles. If more money was involved, they probably had to raise investment money, and then there was due diligence. And that’s not proof. But it’s harder to fake.
And using my prior points, a quick check using our friends at Magnus:
See that word choice? “FDA clearance”. And a link to a press release. Those are things you generally don’t do if you’re just trying to sell a scammy thing.
Also:
They are hiring. Real companies that are growing and scaling up and bringing anything to the market have to hire people.
So my guess is that Neurowrap is probably a scam. I happen to know Magnus Medical isn’t a scam. However, its website is realistic enough that I don’t need to have that extra information to be able to answer the question for myself.
A fine point:
Actual medical devices and actual pharmaceuticals are required to have separate websites for healthcare professionals and non-professionals. This is a regulatory requirement, but scams don’t have any such regulation. It’s a good tell.2
Thanks for joining me for this episode of “real or fake?” With your host,
—O. Scott Muir, M.D.
Make sure to subscribe now to not miss out on a single—doubtless breathtaking—upcoming topic:
Private equity gets into the teen paranormal romance protagonist space
Major healthcare entities say the darnedest things
Due diligence on classic Silicon Valley failures
Personal stories of hope and triumph
Guides to negotiating your intellectual property and arbitration agreements
The true story of why I use my middle name online
With this footnote, I will continue my ongoing campaign to urge the Nobel committee to select Nolan Williams, MD, for the 2023 Nobel prize in medicine and physiology, for his research around the technology commercialized by Magnus Medical.
Epilogue: while Carlene and I were texting about the edit of this piece, the following showed up:
That kind of advertising spend is the kind of thing that investors at real medical device companies would question. Also, and this is grim, but most healthcare expenses are not split into equal payments. Med Devices are not a space, sadly, where affordability is considered. The bills are huge. They are shocking. They are often heavily discounted…down to some other very large number. But this reads to me more like a Snuggie sales pitch than a health technology pitch.