GHR-15 Questions?
False Claims and Legal Issues This blog welcomes customers who have bought and used GHR-15 from BIE Health Products in Canada. Products like this are known as "Growth Hormone Releasers". The companies that promote them all make false claims.
GHR won’t make you look or feel younger, stronger, improve your sexual prowess, stop your hair from falling out, or have any positive effect on health issues.
Companies flogged GHR without any regard for clinical evidence or research. They just made it "sound" scientific. But, in fact none of their claims have ever been true.
They are all just professional grifters who set out to take your money. In the U.S. they are still thriving because they know that the FDA hasn’t been able to challenge most of them in court.
Efforts in the U.S. to control their bogus ads have been futile. The US FTC (Federal Trade Commission) basically threw up their hands over false advertising of GHR-15 and also from many other companies. Scores of other companies set up multiple web sites selling their own versions of GHR over the last two decades.
In Canada, one particular product GHR-15 was first marketed in the early 2000s by Burlington, Ontario company named BIE Health Products. This company was founded by Richard Beemer who has admitted that he had no scientific training in sworn depositions. BIE maintained a number of U.S. Internet locations including biehealth.com and biehealth.us.
Beemer fought back when Health Canada (HC) received complaints over many years about the false claims made by BIE in numerous publications and on their web sites. HC asked the Canadian Border Services and other shipping agencies to block GHR-15 coming up from the U.S. to Canada for years. In the Summer of 2005, Health Canada finally issued a public warning to consumers about GHR-15. Dozens of media outlets, newspapers, and health organizations repeated or linked to the HC warning. The Canadian government never criminally charged Mr. Beemer or his company.
Beemer was fed up with the HC-directed border seizures. So, he hired an agent to threaten legal actions against the Canadian government, media outlets, health organizations, and Dr. Terry Polevoy. The man chosen by Beemer to direct the threats was Trueman Tuck. He was at the front of many other campaigns to defend health quackery over the years.
Tuck was actually just a businessman who turned his career around by registering as a lobbyist. He was well-known in the Eastern Ontario city of Belleville. Trueman was an erstwhile politician who ran many times unsuccessfully for public office. He ran a local health food store with members of his family and had separate business as an unlicensed paralegal for many years.
As a result of his association with other natural food product vendors in Canada, he was hired by Richard Beemer. This resulted in the first multi-million dollar lawsuit for libel and defamation in the July 2005.
It was crystal clear to Dr. Polevoy, a physician from Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario that Tuck was way over his head. The illegal lawsuit lingered on for over three years. It wasn’t until Mr. Tuck faced legal action by the LSO (Law Society of Ontario) in a Belleville for practicing law without a license, and he was fined over $16,000, that the “lawsuit” was turned over to an actual registered solicitor, Paul Starkman from the Toronto area. Some of Dr. Polevoy’s original web sites and blogs featured his history with Richard Beemer, Trueman Tuck, and their entourage of others who supported a libertarian attitude towards the regulation of natural health products.
Some of them had libeled and defamed Dr. Polevoy because of his activism against fraudulent products, devices and errant quacks.
Tuck, originally filed the lawsuit against Health Canada and other government officials, including Dr. Terry Polevoy, MD. But, he wasn't licensed as a lawyer. Polevoy, MD, from Kitchener-Waterloo, was widely known as a "quackbuster" who widely tracked and featured health quackery on his many web sites and blogs since 1997. Quackerywatch.com/GHR/
Quackerywatch.blogspot.com
Original lawsuit filed in 2005 It’s been over two decades since various vendors of natural health products called “Growth Hormone Releasers” made wild and unsupported claims. They just flogged their products without any regard for clinical evidence or research. Their clams were made to sound scientific. But, in fact none of their claims were true.
In Dr. Polevoy's opinion, companies who market GHR variants were all just professional grifters who clearly aimed to take your money. In the U.S. they are still thriving because they know that the FDA and/or the FTC haven’t been able to challenge most of them in court.
Efforts in the U.S. to control their bogus ads have been futile. Their FTC (Federal Trade Commission) basically threw up their hands over false advertising of GHR-15 and also from many other companies. Scores of other companies set up multiple web sites selling their own versions of GHR over the last two decades.
The claims for nearly all of the GHR-type products were not just deceptive, they were clearly fraudulent.
FTC FAILED TO TAKE ACTION AGAINST BIE HEALTH PRODUCTS CANADA
After many months of useless sparring with Trueman Tuck, the FTC tossed it over to their NAD (National Advertising Division) for action and comments. On June 15, 2006 they released a short statement about BIE Health Products total refusal to cooperate with any of their requests to prove their claims.
Here is what the NAD said:
"NAD was disappointed that the advertiser declined to participate in this
self-regulatory proceeding, especially in light of the strong health-related
claims being made in the advertising"
They referred the case back to the FTC and the FDA where absolutely nothing has been done since 2006!
In April 2009, the
Council For Responsible Nutrition filed a detailed complaint about GHR advertising "Choose Life Grow Young with HGH" and "Reverse Aging Miracle" that had appeared in Northwest Airlines in-flight magazine in March 2009. It's blue ad is featured at the top of this blog. They asked questions of the NAD about why nothing had been done to stop their false advertising.
But, the FTC did take action against many other scammers who promoted HGH releaser products. The best example is their action against Great American Products, Physicians Choice and Michael Teplisky who flooded the Internet and AM radio stations nationwide with informercials hawking their products for years.
Read the transcript included in their decision along with their ads.
More actions were taken against companies that sold HGH releaser products by the FTC. But, none of them are based here in Canada. The FTC never attacked our Burlington, Ontario based BIE Health Products that had their own web sites and had their U.S. GHR-15 made and shipped their GHR-15 from the U.S. to Canadian customers. In other words, the U.S, government did nothing to stop BIE's source of GHR-15 from being made there, and then shipped to Canada.
July 29, 2004
From Making Baseless Health Claims - February 25, 2020
February 4, 2008
CREAGHAN A. HARRY,
individually and doing business as
HITECH MARKETING,
SCIENTIFIC
LIFE NUTRITION, and
REJUVENATION HEALTH COW., - June 2005
Since then, the FTC has gone after a number of other fraudulent vendors. Health Canada has tried to block the sale of GHR-15 successfully here, but there are scores of other companies who continue to market GHR type products around the world.
Again, the main problem here in Canada is the total lack of speed in bringing our case to a successful conclusion. Thousands of documents have been presented, hundreds of thousands of dollars expended to defend ourselves! 18+ years is a very long time to wait for justice here in Canada!
What you can expect from this blog:
We will attempt to profile major events in the BIE lawsuit here in Canada over the last 18 years. The case has still not been heard in a proper court of law. However, additional Affidavits by both the plaintiff and the defendants were submitted in September 2021.
The Plaintiff's attorney seems bent on drawing out the lawsuit at each and every turn. Meanwhile, their own GHR-15 remains banned for sale here in Canada. However, BIE has continued to advertised in Canadian magazines on a regular basis, including Zoomer Magazine, and Old Farmer's Almanac using their Burlington address.
The plaintiff is now asking for about $38 million in damages. Starkman has succeeded in tying up the case at every level, creating a tangled maze of demands on Dr. Polevoy and the Federal government. Thousands of pages of evidence have been given to the plaintiff’s solicitor, mostly by Health Canada, and the yet the plaintiff continues to file more and more requests.
Dr. Zoltan Rona's "contributions" to the BIE lawsuit
In September 2021, Paul Starkman gathered his so-called "medical experts" together and filed some supplemental Affidavits with the Courts. One of these submissions was written by Dr. Zoltan Rona, a long-time alternative medicine guru from the Toronto area.
Dr. Rona has had a very interesting history, starting with his involvement for a few years with the Church of Scientology in the late 70s and early 80s. He then became a rather well-known author and started marketing all sorts of products himself on the Internet.
He was a regular contributor to the Townsend Letter, which flogged all sorts of complementary and alternative medical (CAM) advise for decades. He was frequently a featured speaker and panel member at numerous Whole Life Expos in Toronto where he appeared alongside quack practitioners and vendors of all sorts of remedies and devices. His own private practice was supportive of CAM and he dispensed all sorts of natural health products, including homeopathic remedies. They were often used to treat very serious health conditions. Sometimes, this got him in trouble with Health Canada's NHPD regulators. More recently, his medical practice regulator, the CPSO (College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario), placed him before their disciplinary Tribunal. On 4 November 2022, they reached a final decision.
The Tribunal stated, "you displayed a serious lack of knowledge, skill and judgment when, for several months, you failed to recognize the severity of a patient's symptoms and associated condition, and the need for immediate medical attention."
In addition, the Tribunal raised the serious issues of his 680 posts about COVID-19 efforts that he posted to Twitter in an 11 month period between September 2020 and July 2021. The CPSO forced him to stop posting after October on Twitter, but his old posts are still there. Unfortunately, the CPSO was hardly ever able to address Dr. Rona's support for alternative remedies and his flogging of quack products during his entire medical career, which spanned 44 years. The CPSO has rarely challenged doctors who have practiced CAM. It seemed to take a COVID-19 pandemic to start them on their way to actually doing something about doctors who stretch the truth and actually endanger their patients and the general public. Requests from the public
We appeal to anyone who has ever bought or used any products like GHR-15 to contribute to the defense of our position. Let us know what they promised you and if they delivered on their claims. It would also be nice to hear from anyone in Canada and the U.S. who has filed an official complaint against any company that has marketed products like this.
Comments are blocked because of the bots and scammers who swamped my original web site with thousands of their own thoughts. Some were in Russian, and many of them were of a sexual nature.
So, we moved it over to another WordPress site, and hope that the spamming stops.
Thanks to all who care about consumer health fraud! Support for the defense of Dr. Polevoy's lawsuit can be sent to him via
E-transfer to: drpolevoy@yahoo.com
Thanks a million.
Comments
Post a Comment