There have been a lot of comments in chat and on the forums about HCG. I wanted to bring some research to bear on the issue.
One that raises questions in my mind is when hCG weight-loss web sites try to undermine the FDA and American Medical Association to peddle their product. A Google search for "hcg, FDA, and AMA" found quotes among the taglines like:
- "The FDA and AMA are NOT NOT NOT infallible."
- "I had exceedingly good results on HCG (injectable) diets many years ago, but the FDA and AMA have since intimidated almost all U.S. doctors into not [prescribing it]."
It sure seems to me like a weight loss program for the anti-government crowd. If David Koresh or Timothy McVeigh were still around, they might act as celebrity spokesmen.
Of course, the FDA has a mission to protect the citizens of the United States from quack medicines. Is it infallible? Probably not, but its opinion is infinitely more useful than the claims of a given web site or weight loss clinic, few of which are themselves infallible.
Of course, being a researcher, I looked around for
why the FDA had disapproved of HCG as a weight-loss drug.
I found it in the article,
"Ten Pounds in Ten Days: A Sampler of Diet Scams and Abuse," by Laura Fraser for the CareMark web site. About 2/3rds of Fraser's article deals with HGC and traces its misuse over nearly half a century.
Another strange obesity cure that was popular among physicians for a time was human chorionic gonadotropin (HGC), a type of growth hormone that was injected into patients. This treatment became popular in 1957, when Harper's Bazaar printed a diet -- "Slimming: A Roman Doctor's Treatment" -- that consisted of 500 calories a day for up to forty days, plus daily hormone injections. In the article, the physician, British endocrinologist A.T.W. Simeons, claimed his patients weren't hungry as long as they took shots of HCG, which is produced by the placenta and derived from the urine of pregnant women (variations on this treatment used the urine of pregnant rabbits and mares). It's the very hormone, in fact, that turns the stick blue on a home pregnancy test.
Human chorionic gonadotropin was legitimately used at the time to treat a condition called Fröhlich's syndrome, a hormonal imbalance that affects young boys, disturbing their sexual development, appetite, and sleep, and causing them to accumulate fat on the hips, buttocks, and thighs. Simeons reasoned that if the drug worked to melt away the fat on those boys with a rare genetic disorder, then it ought to do the same thing on normal, healthy women. The hormone, he wrote, would cause a "normal distribution" of fat on the body and would correct a "basic disorder in the brain." His diet book -- Pounds and Inches: A New Approach to Obesity -- included other gems of pseudo-medical advice, warning readers to eat no breakfast whatsoever, except for coffee, and to abstain from using any cosmetics or lotion on the body because it will be absorbed and added to the existing fat deposits in the body.
Simeon's treatment became all the rage; for a time, it was the most widespread medication given in the United States to lose weight, and was the main treatment used in eighty Weight Reduction Medical Clinics in California. Unfortunately, it didn't work: None of the mainly female patients seeking treatment, it turned out, were suffering from Fröhlich's syndrome. The medical establishment only started to become suspicious of the drug when reports surfaced that part-time doctors were being offered as much as $100,000 a year by weight-loss clinics to spend one afternoon a week sitting and writing pads of prescriptions for the drug.
In 1962, the Journal of the American Medical Association warned against the Simeons diet, saying "continued adherence to such a drastic regimen is potentially more hazardous to the patient's health than continued obesity." In 1974, the Food and Drug Adminstration required producers of HCG to label the drug with a warning against using it for weight loss or fat redistribution. In Canada, the Task Force on the Treatment of Obesity warned that the use of the hormone "touches on possible malpractice." Nevertheless, a few diet doctors continued with the treatment -- it is legal, after all, for physicians to prescribe medications for purposes that are not approved by the FDA -- often handing the patients the drugs and injection equipment so they could administer it themselves....
And human chorionic gonadotropin is still being peddled at conventions of diet doctors. In the exhibit hall at the American Society of Bariatric Physicians conference, I picked up a bottle of HCG and read the package insert. HCG, it said, "has not been demonstrated to be effective adjunctive therapy in the treatment of obesity. There is no substantial evidence that it increases weight loss beyond that resulting this from caloric restriction." I asked the vendor whether the physicians buy for weight loss. He shrugged. "They buy it," he said. "It's up to them what they use it for."
The FDA has been very clear about this: HCG is not a weight loss drug. Only because it has been approved for medical conditions unrelated to weight loss can doctors even prescribe it at all.
Personally, that means to me that it's worth a second opinion if it's worth any of your money at all.
