Apathy Sketchpad

Okay, so perhaps an ibuprofen tablet doesn’t really warrant such a grandiose title, but bear with me here. I have three problems with Nurofen.

The first is that their website has a page devoted to homeopathy. I mean, it has many pages under its “Holistic Approach” umbrella page. They are as follows:

• Aromatherapy
• Acupuncture
• Alexander Technique
• Chiropractic
• Herbal medicines
• Homeopathy
• Osteopathy
• Physiotherapy
• Reflexology
• Yoga
• Hypnosis

Now personally, if I was a physiotherapist I would be mightily pissed at being lumped in with those quacks. Luckily I’m not — apparently, I’m an osteopath, and a long dead one to boot. Now I would have thought that a drugs manufacturer would have been broadly against the idea that a glass of water can basically do the same thing without any side-effects but apparently I would be wrong. Presumably Nurofen want to please the crazy crowd so they think “hey, this lot aren’t so bad, they’re probably not like the other Big Pharma”. But of course Nurofen is a drug. It’s a Big Nasty Chemical. It’s C₁₃H₁₈O₂. But they’re determined to pander to the woo crowd so pander they do. Unfortunately, drugs are made by scientists, so they aren’t very good at pretending this stuff works. Most pages refer to a grand total of one study and report its results alone, regardless of the fact that there are generally hundreds of contradictory ones. Here are a couple of examples:

Many people claim that aromatherapy does help to ease their pain. And there is some research to back up their claims. In 1992, for instance, the International Journal of Aromatherapy published a study on aromatherapy and pain relief: the study showed that massage with lavender oil actually helped to cut pain levels in patients by half.

Although there’s very little research to support reflexology, some studies have shown it can have an effect. For instance, in a reflexology and pre-menstrual syndrome research study (conducted in 1992), reflexology was found to help relieve premenstrual syndrome. And in [1993] a report by the Society of Orthopaedic Nursing and the Royal College of Nursing, showed that reflexology helped relieve pain in post-operative patients.

But does homeopathy work? Well, research shows that a homeopathic effect does exist. Many adults, children, animals and even plants have been successfully treated with homeopathy. And studies at Glasgow Homeopathic Hospital have shown homeopathy to be effective in the treatment of hay fever.

They’re not even fooling themselves, are they? I love the bit where it says “plants have been successfully treated with homeopathy”. Wilting, were they? My God… They make no such claims about physiotherapy, so we’re left unsure as to whether that works.

That’s the first problem I have with them: that they’re happy to promote any old nonsense as science if they think it will make money. But I’m not willing to write off a company just for that, so let’s see what else they do.

Now, you won’t know this, because clearly it’s too generic when divorced from the advert, but Nurofen’s slogan is “targeted relief from pain”. They say things like “Nurofen goes straight to the source of pain”, which is false. It’s ibuprofen, which indeed works at the “source of pain” rather than blocking receptors in the brain, but it doesn’t know where it’s going. It’s only a pill. It doesn’t actually seek out the source of the pain.

Except of course that it does, according to an Australian Nurofen advert:

Nurofen, on the other hand, works with your bodys natural pain signals to seek out and target pain at its source. Once the source of pain has been identified, Nurofen can go to work fast.

How do I know what Australian adverts say, you might reasonably ask? Simple: I did a Google search for their slogan and got this page from the TGACC, Australia’s healthcare equivalent of the ASA, where Nurofen are told off for their advert (though not specifically for this).

The point is that Nurofen has been saying for years that their pill somehow knows where it’s going, and travels straight there. They have a little target icon that goes to where the graphic is hurting and stays there, clearly implying that the drug doesn’t just wash about the bloodstream blocking pain emitters wherever it sees them. They say “targeted” relief, as if I should think that if I ask it to stop my headache it will know not to stop my toothache as well. All of their “targeting” stuff is just supposed to mean that it blocks pain and nothing else, which is patently not what it looks like when you see the advert and which GlaxoSmithKline insist isn’t true.

And my third problem? Well, much like their list of “holistic” treatments, their list of “types of pain” is woefully inaccurate. Here’s the list as it appears on their website:

• Headaches
• Tension Headaches
• Migraine Headaches
• Muscular Pain
• Back Pain
• Period Pain
• Dental Pain
• Feverishness
• Cold and Flu
• Neuralgia
• Upper Back Pain
• Lower Back Pain
• Aches and Sprains
• Children

Honestly — they list “children” as a type of pain. Which I’m sure nobody’s going to argue with, but it’s hardly a popular choice for corporate image, is it, the anti-children platform?

My problem with this list is that these are the only medically accepted types of pain:

• Pain
• Pain Plus

Now you would think Nurofen would know that, wouldn’t you?