Another one of my ASA complaints resolved this week – along with yet more about misleading healthcare claims

There were only six adjudications listed on the ASA website this week and the only one relating to health was yet another example of opticians complaining about each other. I am so bored with this that I can’t even be bothered to link to the other seemingly countless examples recently encountered. To any reader less disinterested than I, they aren’t hard to find.

Of the sixty informally resolved cases, seven were in the Health and Beauty sector:

• Bedford Chiropractic Clinic
• Beige Banana Ltd t/a HearingAid.org.uk
• i-Slim Weight and Inch Loss Clinic
• Life-Work Potential Ltd t/a Healthandgoodness.com
• Steps To Perfect Health
• The Stammering-Cured Fluency Centre
• The Wellness Tree Ltd t/a Quantumwave Lasers

I’m proud to say that I was the person who originally complained about Steps To Perfect Health, asking that they substantiate claims they had made about a range of ‘clinical tests’ (including Live Blood Analysis). I also expressed concern that they had listed all manner of ‘organs and glands’ they could identify as ‘underfunctioning’ or containing ‘toxic settlements’ and a wide range of medical conditions (some of them serious) they could ‘succesfully help’.  I expect the offending statements to disappear from the website shortly.

It appears that the British Stammering Association are behind one of the other complaints, as part of their campaign against misleading treatment claims. According to their website, The British Stammering Association has campaigned for several years to eradicate misleading advertising claims made by stammering treatment providers. They say:

Some claim, for example, that they can ‘cure’ or ‘eliminate’ stammering. But it is not possible to ‘cure’ a stammer, in the accepted medical sense of the word. Accordingly, we believe such claims not only give false hope to those who stammer – but also give people who don’t stammer the false impression that stammering can easily be rectified.

Searching the ASA website with the term ‘stammering’ reveals three adjudications and two informally resolved cases.

The final resolved complaint on my list concerned a treatment known as the ‘Quantumwave Laser’, which according to the company website is:

The first of its kind using the world’s newest cold laser technology combined with state of the art quantum scalar waves to address every facet of stress, health, pain relief and rejuvenation.

Judging from this thread and this blog , where you can find lots of interesting background information about Quantumwave Lasers (along with evidence of a more recent complaint), it appears they have been a victim of FishBarrel.

This gives details of an even older complaint by a different person.

Searching the ASA website reveals this adjudication from March 2nd of this year, relating to a leaflet which had claimed the laser therapy ‘could treat or cure illnesses such as cancer, AIDS, mental health issues, genetic diseases and leukaemia’. I believe this sort of advertising is not only misleading but also dangerous (and illegal under the Cancer Act 1939). I’m always pleased to see it being dealt with by the authorities.