The FDA has issued a warning about a nasal spray called Zicam after numerous users reported a permanent loss of their sense of smell and taste. My first thought is: how did this stuff get approved by the FDA to begin with? The answer is: the FDA didn’t approve it because Zicam is supposedly a homeopathic remedy. While the FDA doesn’t approve such things, they do have the authority to issue warnings once a problem is discovered.
Typical of mainstream media coverage on alternative medicine is this report from ABC News. They say Zicam is homeopathic but they never explain what it is or that there is controversy over its efficacy.
A better report can be found at the Wall Street Journal, and Snopes.com has a pretty good summary (status: Undetermined).
Now I’m confused. As you may know, homeopathic remedies involve taking an active ingredient (which may or may not actually cure what it’s intended to cure) and progressively dilute it with water until the active ingredient exists in parts per billion, or perhaps not even at all! Typically, homeopathy isn’t harmful in and of itself; the harm comes when patients choose this alternative medicine to real medicine.
So back to Zicam. How can something that’s supposedly just water cause people to lose their senses of smell and taste? There are a number of possibilities:
a) Zicam contains significant quantities of the active ingredient (zinc, in this case); in which case it’s not homeopathic
b) Zicam contains significant quantities of something else (a contaminant or secondary ingredient)
c) The reported cases of people losing their smell and taste are bogus and/or unrelated to Zicam
UPDATE: While it doesn’t look like anyone has gotten to the bottom of the Zicam controversy, it looks like some homeopathic remedies do contain significant concentrations of potentially hazardous chemicals.
I had no idea that Zicam wasn’t FDA-approved. I’ve never bought or taken any, but the way it’s packaged and marketed in the story made it seem to me like an over-the counter drug (which would mean it would be FDA-approved). I bet a lot of people don’t realize this. Even though the label apparently says “homeopathic”, how many people know what that really means?
And I also didn’t know that Zicam and other so-called homeopathic remedies can have larger amounts of chemicals or other substances in them. From what I had already read (and I believe as you discussed on a previous episode), I thought homeopathic remedies were all very watered down. I see this isn’t necessarily the case, which makes them a lot less harmless than a lot of people think.
Maybe they should start calling them sociopathic or psychopathic drugs instead of homeopathic! Thank you very much for the information, I’ll be sure to mention this to people when they think homeopathic treatments are safe or at least harmless.
Frankly, I didn’t know that homeopathic remedies could have significant concentrations of active ingredients, either–not until I started reading these news items. This changed my whole view of homeopathy as harmless waste-of-effort to potential poison!
John — Respectful Insolence on Science Blogs discussed recently that some homeopathic medicines have additional ingredients. Check it out!
Thanks for posting this, I too was fooled – almost!
I googled Zicam after seeing a commercial just because I wondered if it had zinc in it. After seeing this I dont care what it has, Im not taking it!