Talk:Matthias Rath

POV dispute

Rath is very controversial where he is active (mostly Germany). He seems to claim to have discovered revolutionary cures for cancer and other diseases. The pharma establishment is allegedly trying to keep his cheap medicine from becoming publicly known. He seems to be quite successful in selling his drugs, books, and other merchandising to his cult-like following, though (apparently to the tune of millions of Euros). He certainly has some prominent enemies among established scientists, but that doesn't prove he's right. There are (or have been) related court cases in 2005. All taken from the German page. Caveat emptor. Rl 17:34, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Links to the articles with English translations would be greatly appreciated to moderate the main article.

Additions in the form of minor translations have been added. --203.61.148.216 14:09, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Clean of links added --203.61.187.204 09:29, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Rath and AIDS

Rath has stirred up considerable controversy in South Africa with his stance on AIDS (his position on cancer, heart disease etc is not well known in the country). He has presented standard anti-retrovirals as toxic, and suggested that they should be replaced with vitamin treatments. He has started clinics in impoverished area where vitamin treatments are distributed despite his not being registered as a doctor in the country (the Treatment Action Campaign have accused him of undertaking illegal experiments on people in these clinics).

The South African Medical Association, the Southern African HIV Clinicians Society, UNAIDS, WHO and UNICEF have all condemned his actions. Harvard researchers Wafaie Fawzi and David Hunter accused Rath of misrepresenting their studies so as to get AIDS sufferers to cease anti-retroviral treatment and to take vitamins instead. Halfsnail 12:55, 21 September 2005 (UTC)

Some of reports of the controversy over the Rath Health Foundation in South Africa can be found at a former employee's web site: http://www.aids-vitamins.org/indexnew.htm.

A relatively well-balanced view of Dr. Rath's claims, litigations, and opponents' views can be found on the Skeptic's Dictionary website: http://skepdic.com/rath.html This might be helpful in putting together a more balanced Wikipedia page.

Anti-retrovirals are not toxic?

"He has presented standard anti-retrovirals as toxic..."

There is a wealth of information on this topic. ARV's are most definitely toxic as substantiated by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiretroviral_drug :

"Antiretroviral regimens are complex, have serious side effects, pose difficulty with adherence, ..."

Rath does more than simply present ARVs as toxic. In adverts in South Africa he claims they make AIDS worse. This is despite the evidence that ARVs reduce mortality and morbidity for people with AIDS, albeit that they have side-effects. Rath is a charlatan and this needs to come out much more clearly in the wikipedia article. He has a long list of rulings and findings against him and there is growing evidence that his actions in South Africa have resulted in a number of avoidable deaths. For example, a woman on his South African website, Marietta Ndziba, claimed that his vitamins made her better. She died a couple of months later. She should have been on antiretroviral treatment. As of 28/12/2005 Ndziba's testimony is still on Rath's website. The man has no shame. A detailed expose of his wrong-doings can be found on the TAC website, www.tac.org.za as well as on quackwatch, with references to original sources. The most critical ones should be incorporated into the wikipedia article.

Incidentally, it is only only TAC that claims he has conducted illegal experiments on people, so does the South African Medical Association.

The Above Emotional Name Calling is Interesting

Its always interesting to find medicos calling others names when the number of people having in-hospital, adverse reactions to prescribed drugs exceeds 2.2 million per year. Oh well, nobody's perfect (and certainly the "science" of modern medicine isn't perfect either.)

Equal Opportunity Paranoia

To the defenders of Matthias Rath: A certain distrust of large pharmaceutical companies and the medical profession is probably healthy, but please be reasonable. Physicians could probably be better regulated, but all the same they operate in a controlled environment, and they are accountable legally and ethically for the decisions they make. Matthias Rath operates completely outside any kind of effective regulation, and clearly accepts no legal or (worse) ethical responsibility for the impact of his actions. The huge profits he undoubtedly realizes off the backs of the desperate people who come to him are hidden from scrutiny. OK, be suspicious of the medical establishment and its motives, but at least be consistent; why are these same folks so quick to accept that Matthias Rath's motives are pure as the driven snow?

Needs work

This article is in sad shape in a few ways. It seems neglected, it's disorganized, there's plenty that doesn't directly relate to Rath, and the grammar and prose style need work. I've tried to start cleaning it up so it can be re-expanded, preferably by someone who knows more about Rath than I do. MastCell 04:09, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

Addition of POV

The previous edit by User:Whitedragon1976 was reverted; it contained POV and lacked citations for its claims. If we address issues like the cause of Dominik Feld's death, then we need citations from reliable sources (see Wikipedia:Reliable Sources for guidelines). In other words, it's fine to quote Rath's website (or that of his colleagues) as long as it's made clear that it expresses Rath's point of view; but more reliable sources are needed to back up claims that Feld's physicians killed him, etc. Finally, it doesn't seem fair to characterize Rath's opponents as engaged in a "smear campaign" when the Rath himself has been found guilty in court of slandering his opponents and ordered to desist. MastCell 18:07, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

NPOV and cleanup tags

I'm going to remove the cleanup tag, which I placed myself. About the POV tag, can we get a rehash of where the POV issues are so they can be addressed? Ultimately of course we should remove it, but it seems that discussion on this article has been dormant for some time, so it's hard for me to know where the concerns are and who has voiced them. I think a "sources" tag might be more appropriate, since much of the information about Rath's history and practice are unsourced or poorly sourced. MastCell 00:50, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

Having heard nothing, I will remove the POV tag. If there is a feeling that it needs to be reinstated, please discuss here. MastCell 02:45, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

Neutrality of the Marburger Federation Claim Questionable

I would suggest looking into the current status of the rulings from Germany, not any of my own "POV." —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Whitedragon1976 (talk • contribs) .

Equal Opportunity Criticism

As MastCell mentions, it is unfair to estoppel the position point of one party while letting those opinions of the other party flow freely. While Dr. Rath may have accused certain pharmaceutical entities of perpetuating the more than 2.2 million verified and documented polypharmacy or monopharmacy deaths, certain entities accuse Dr. Rath of wrongdoing. So while it is fair to document some of the criticisms against Dr. Rath, it is not neutral to avoid the facts regarding the millions of people who die from properly prescribed synthetic medication. Argument and conflict between competing medical factions is not something unique. All these facts may be reliably sourced. In Rath's cancer book, he himself mentions at the end that his discoveries may not work in cases of advanced disease and that he is making efforts towards efficacy in this regard. Despite this, there is solid independent science supporting his claims just as there is solid science supporting the claims of pharmaceutical drug manufacturers. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Whitedragon1976 (talk • contribs) .

I'm not sure exactly where we're going with this. My additions to the article consist of a summary of legal judgements against Rath for libel and false advertising, peer-reviewed literature in respectable journals indicating that he makes claims unsupported by medical evidence, and an independent study of his claims by a group sympathetic to alternative medicine. These are all backed up by sources that meet WP:RS guidelines - that is, non-partisan legal documents, peer-reviewed medical literature, etc. I haven't edited the section about Rath's claimed discoveries, because I'm not as familiar with that area. If you, or anyone, are more familiar and interested in summarizing Rath's beliefs, claims, etc, then please edit away. But be aware that blanket claims will need to be backed up by reliable sources; if they're based solely on Rath's claims on his website, then they need to be clearly identified as such. MastCell 17:09, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

Abundant misinterpretations abound in this article.

This article seems to serve the purpose of providing misinterpretations of Rath's positions and methodologies quite well.

The 2004 SKAK report is an opinion paper or more specifically a position paper directly targeting the vitamins and herbs contained in Rath's formulations while leaving the same vitamins and herbs used in other formulations manufactured by countless nutraceutical companies unaddressed and the numerous epidemiological studies unaddressed. While they find no proof that vitamins and herbs have any effect on human cancer, they also provide no definitive disproof other than the reason that they cannot find any proof. This is somewhat akin to not being able to find a lost item and then claiming it doesn't exist.

Certainly, an objective evaluation of standard chemotherapy/radiation/surgery will reveal some harsh realities regarding the real statistics of who lives for how long when on this treatment. It is not up to anyone other than the patient and their relations with good faculties of decision to decide the course of their health and how they will manage it. The not so occasional lethality of standard cancer therapy is the very reason for Rath's goodwilled approach in providing avenues for discovering, demonstrating, and implementing alternatives.

Regarding heart disease and the vitamin C connection, which is actually an inflammatory condition brought about by lack of vitamin C, there is too much scientific literature to fit here that will be instantly torn down if posted on the article itself. The missing link is protein up and downregulation by vitamin C as well as cytokine signaling by the arterial wall. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Whitedragon1976 (talk • contribs)

The 2004 SKAK report independently examines Rath's claims, from a POV that is sympathetic to alt-med in general. That particular report focuses on Rath's products; therefore the billions of other nutraceuticals were not addressed. SKAK found no proof to back up Rath's claims. It seems we agree there. Your analogy is misleading; Rath should probably try to prove his treatments actually do something, rather than basing his pitch on the the fact no-one has definitively proven they're worthless. A comparison with chemo is also misleading; chemo treatments are rigorously studied and require FDA approval, while Rath's vitamins are untested and unregulated. Of course people should decide on their own therapies; that's not at issue here. Finally, I agree it's a challenge to address scientific topics well on Wikipedia. Lots of people succeed; I'd encourage you to give it a shot, rather than insinuating that there's tons of evidence but you're being repressed. MastCell 04:11, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

Covert Censorship and Distortion by the Ignorant and those with Pharma Allegiances

I was blocked from editing anything just a few moments ago today from some mysterious individual. Just as quickly, the block was removed. On the weekend that BMJ offered the public apology to Dr. Rath, a truck nearly ran me over, the research facility had a major "power outage," and my computer was severely hacked. As you can see, I am still around, and micronutrients/herbal extracts still work positively for your health as they did yesterday, the year before that, and the century before that. So tell me that the pharmaceutical industry doesn't have an evil henchmen that they covertly hire to harrass the American public. Having said that, there is much opposition regarding nutritional therapy from business interests. After all, business is business, and good businessmen are cunning, heartless, ruthless, and do not care about your health whatsoever. Pharmaceutical companies in their beginning and end are businesses that are plugged into venture capital and stock market economics.

Nutraceuticals are relatively cheap, effective, and science based regardless of any unpalatable, silly, or political laden baggage attached to the delivery of the science of antioxidants, micronutrients, and phytochemicals in combating disease. It is unfortunate that a shoddy delivery that lacks credibility or is laden with rhetoric or combative language can destroy such a precious commodity to human health. This precious commodity to human health is that the simple and ubiquitous can have complex and powerful beneficial effects in combating disease.

Some mysterio has decided to state that Fawzi's papers were "misused." Dr. Rath has never claimed that "vitamins are better than drugs" in HIV treatment or that they are a cure or that HIV patients. He does point to the many limitations of ARV's which are not a cure, may cause other diseases as documented by independent studies, and certainly can generate resistant strains of HIV in a single generation. I will quote what Fawzi says in his paper, and you can decide whether his paper was misused and who is misleading who:

1) 1: Lancet. 1998 May 16;351(9114):1477-82. "Multivitamins, but not vitamin A, resulted in a significant increase in CD4, CD8, and CD3 counts. INTERPRETATION: Multivitamin supplementation is a low-cost way of substantially decreasing adverse pregnancy outcomes and increasing T-cell counts in HIV-1-infected women. The clinical relevance of our findings for vertical transmission and clinical progression of HIV-1 disease is yet to be ascertained."

2) AIDS. 2002 Sep 27;16(14):1935-44. "CONCLUSION: Vitamin A increased the risk of HIV-1 transmission. Multivitamin (B, C, and E) supplementation of breastfeeding mothers reduced child mortality and HIV-1 transmission through breastfeeding among immunologically and nutritionally compromised women. The provision of these supplements to HIV-infected lactating women should be considered."

3) 1: N Engl J Med. 2004 Jul 1;351(1):23-32. "CONCLUSIONS: Multivitamin supplements delay the progression of HIV disease and provide an effective, low-cost means of delaying the initiation of antiretroviral therapy in HIV-infected women. Copyright 2004 Massachusetts Medical Society"

Either he is wrong, or he is correct, or he changes his mind a lot and can't be trusted. Evidence suggests that he is correct, and today he is embarrassed that "vitamins" increase immune function but toxic drugs do not.

In your fight for health... —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Whitedragon1976 (talk • contribs) .

The "mysterios" claiming Rath misused the Fawzi study are actually Fawzi et al themselves... they felt compelled to decry Rath's misuse of their study... hardly mysterious, and fully sourced and relevant. I do not see any blocks on your block log, so I'm not sure why you found yourself unable to edit, nor can I comment on the constellation of events you attributed to "pharmaceutical henchmen". I could go on about how Rath himself is a "businessman" with all of the limitations you described, but I think the bigger point is that Wikipedia is not a soapbox, and the Talk Page Guidelines specifically state that "Talk pages are not a forum for editors to argue their own different points of view about controversial issues." MastCell 20:07, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Soapbox??

1: N Engl J Med. 2004 Jul 1;351(1):23-32. "CONCLUSIONS: Multivitamin supplements delay the progression of HIV disease and provide an effective, low-cost means of delaying the initiation of antiretroviral therapy in HIV-infected women. Copyright 2004 Massachusetts Medical Society" Whitedragon1976

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. You wrote, "Dr. Rath has never claimed that "vitamins are better than drugs" in HIV treatment or that they are a cure or that HIV patients". Maybe you haven't seen Dr Rath's press releases, where he says HIV drugs are poisons, and that "... with micronutrients alone, the AIDS patients could reverse the symptoms of AIDS and lead almost normal lives again." MastCell 22:39, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Have you examined the literature regarding patients who experience the benefit from taking micronutrients (essential vitamins and minerals, or "multivitamin supplement") worldwide and have HIV-AIDS? I am not here to engage in an intellectual hegemony imparted by me nor you, because who wins a pedantic high school debate for their team is not at issue. The issue is that people who are starving and/or malnourished to begin with will never benefit from any treatment, ARV or otherwise. It is akin to giving a man in the desert about to die from thirst the best pill on the planet. As I stated before, and you yourself prove above, Dr. Rath has never claimed that vitamins are better than drugs. The issue is the health of people in a country with limited resources, not who is right or wrong. To ignore underlying issues of poverty, hygiene, lack of food and water while focusing on the purchase of drugs is problematic in that the drugs are not the solution for the root problems. Lastly, it is documented that ARV and HAART certainly have poisonous side effects (cardiotoxicity, vascular toxicity, metabolic disorders, etc.) while lowering viral load and may introduce the possibility of resistant strains of HIV. No one is arguing on the efficacy of ARV or HAART in reducing viral load. Yet, it is also documented by Fawzi and independent groups that micronutrients can prevent the onset of AIDS symptoms, which are not synonymous with HIV infection. Whitedragon1976

But Rath didn't say that, did he? You say micronutrients can "prevent" (in reality, delay) the onset of AIDS. As does the NEJM article. But Rath says micronutrients alone reverse the symptoms of existing AIDS, a claim not in any way supported by the NEJM article, but very convenient as he happens to sell a proprietary blend of micronutrients. Anyhoo, back to Soapbox and the Talk Guidelines. Any comments on the article itself? MastCell 05:06, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Your continual reference to "soapbox" has no relevance whatsoever to the published fact that indeed, sometimes, "micronutrients alone" can reverse symptoms of existing AIDS. (See above reference regarding increases in CD4, CD8, and CD3 count.) And the makers of AIDS drugs happen to be trying to secure sales of their drugs to foreign nations. (?) Free vitamins are evil? Whitedragon1976

BMJ to pay £100,000 damages?

Just flagging up http://www4.dr-rath-foundation.org/pdf-files/future-london-march07.pdf which claims:

"9 January 2007 In an open letter to the BMJ’s Editor-inchief, Fiona Godlee, Dr Rath expressed his determination to have this important case decided in a British court. Perhaps fearing that the scientifically established facts about the health benefits of vitamins would be heard in court and thereby widely publicized, the BMJ changed its strategy. BMJ Editor Godlee filed an application asking the court to rule that Dr Rath should accept the BMJ’s offer of damages to the amount of £100,000.

15 February 2007 In return for the BMJ paying these staggering damages to Dr Rath the British court allows it to avoid the full case being heard in front of a judge. Dr Rath had the option to appeal this decision and ensure that the scientific facts on natural therapies would be heard in court. However, he decided to accept the BMJ’s “offer“ and use the entire award to fund further research and public health education – beginning with the natural health “Victory Lecture“ in London."

AvB ÷ talk 11:53, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

Would be nice to have it from an independent source. So far all I've found is "news" items from the usual suspects. MastCell ^Talk 22:28, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

Indeed. For an example of what such a link should look like, here's a link to a High Court judgement in 2000, refusing Rath's application to take two decisions made by the Advertising Standards Authority to judicial review. Motmot 22:33, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

This is going to be clarified in this Friday's BMJ Jon m

That will be helpful. MastCell ^Talk 16:54, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

I've seen nothing related to Rath in either this week's or last week's BMJ. Can Jon m supply any further information? Trezatium 20:20, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

Here it is, from the 31 March issue, "News in Brief" (BMJ 2007;334:656 (31 March), doi:10.1136/bmj.39167.437083.4E): [1]. Basically, it says Rath asked for ₤100,000 and BMJ accepted the offer to settle. I'm sure the money will be put to good use. MastCell ^Talk 22:31, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, apologies for not getting back to you. Glad that mastcell found this, anyway. Jon m 23:18, 16 April 2007 (UTC)