Friday, October 17, 2008
PHARMACEUTICAL AD FOR ER-DYSFUNCTION FALSELY CLAIMS A PATENT
The August 25th San Francisco Chronicle, page A5, had an ad (one in many other newspapers, I suspect), from the BostonMedicalGroup.com for their proprietary process for treating performance dysfunction for those men for which the new pills don't work. One sentence caught my eye:
"The secret to Boston Medical Group's success lies in The BMG
Method, a proprietary treatment process for Urecktyle Dysfunction
that recently received a U.S. patent. The group is the only
physician network known to have acquired such a patent, ..."
But what is the patent number? The ad doesn't mention it, I couldn't find it on the BMG Web site, nor could I find any patent assigned to Boston Medical Group, or two of its doctors mentioned in the ad - Barry Buffman and Alan Sperber. I am always suspicious of small companies touting patents in medical ads, because the existence of the patent means little medically, and it is all the more suspicious when it is so hard to find the actual patent.
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2 comments:
Great post! I gotta say that companies promising weight loss, muscle growth, penile enlargement, and fixes for sexual dysfunction are prolific when it come to making misleading. irrelevant, or completely untrue claims by citing unproven anecdotal evidence, obscure Eastern-European studies, and shady patent claims.
a related false claim phenomenon is alluding to an invention as a patent pending. Patent pending means an entity has filed a provisional application for a patent, without any legal claims and describing an invention in plain language. The entity has 1 year from the date of filing to submit the final application having legal claims.
"Pending" does not mean an idea coming to fruition, or the preparing to submit an invention. Consumers should be aware of these falsities, especially when dealing with health products.
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