Imagine that a multi-million dollar drug company secured a deal with a local council to trial a product on schoolchildren. Imagine that the drug is marketed as improving children’s concentration and learning, but has no reliable evidence behind it. Imagine that the “trial” turns not to have a control arm, which means the study can’t actually measure the effect of the drug. Imagine, further, that the company arranged the trial as part of a major marketing drive aimed at parents keen to improve their children’s school grades.

Imagine, to raise another situation, that a sector of the health industry is pressuring government into relaxing marketing laws so that they can sell products with health claims for which they have no scientific evidence. Imagine that they can label their products as “alleviating cancer” or “for the treatment of diabetes” even if there is no evidence to demonstrate the promised benefit. Imagine that the government goes along with this, explaining that this is not to help the public but to expand the market.

Would there be outrage? Would newspaper editorials thunder about the wickedness and greed of the drug company? Would the Opposition rise up and demand protection of the public against misleading health claims? The answer, demonstrably, is no. These two scenarios are taking place right now in the UK, and the only protest is coming from the medical scientific community and is largely being ignored by journalists and politicians. If anything, the media are giving the drug company lots of uncritical support, adding to its marketing power, and generating supportive quotes from the Education Authority. Meanwhile, the watering down of the health marketing laws passed without public or parliamentary debate.

How is it possible for a multi-million dollar drug company to get away with a dubious, marketing-driven pseudo-trial on schoolchildren? Well, the drug that brings in their their millions is fish oil. How is it possible for a multi-billion dollar industry to get away with having laws rewritten to allow them to invent health claims, for instance promising to protect travellers from malaria with untested medicines? Because the industry in question is homeopathy.

More on the fish oil pseudo-trial here, here, and here. More on homeopathy clinics selling untested preventives for malaria here. For those who want to know why testing a product on low-performing children without a control group is a bad idea, read about regression to the mean.