Monday, September 11, 2006

Another Triumph in the Courts

I discovered an interesting bit of news today. It seems that a judge in Illinois has ruled that selling a piece of cheap jewelry -- like the Q-Ray Bracelet -- with a claim that it relieves pain is false advertising.
U.S. District Judge Morton Denlow ordered QT Inc. of Mount Prospect, Illinois, and its owner, Que Te Park, to refund more than 100,000 buyers of the bracelets -- priced up to $249.95 -- and forfeit profits of $22.6 million earned between 2000 and 2003.
That's right: even if a substantial percentage of customers claim that they actually experienced pain relief due to the placebo effect, advertising that your product actually provides some medical benefit without actual scientific evidence to support the claim is false advertising, and you can lose millions in court.

Now if people would just start suing the homeopaths and their ilk in the alternative medicine market...

1 comment:

CFeagans said...

I'm glad to see these small victories as courts reign in fraudsters. There was a similar case in Dallas/Irving, TX with a bogus gas tank supplement that turned out to be moth balls, which was supposed to improve gas mileage.

What these rulings do is create precedent that can be built upon for future cases that go before courts. It also puts the bogus claims in the public eye, if only locally.

Perhaps it may become the responsibility of us bloggers to transform that local news into global news as we educate the public. I can't count the number of hits on "Kevin Trudeau" my blog gets from those looking for information about his products.