I plugged
Mannatech fraud into Google and came up with a number of interesting sites. Eos already posted a link which leads to one of the most informative ones, an article entitled
"AMBROTOSE AND BEYOND" by Moira Smith about the dubious Dr See and his connection with Mannatech.
Network-marketing company Mannatech arrived in Australia promoting its glyconutritional supplements containing "Ambrotose Complex" around the beginning of 1999. Much of the company’s publicity was aimed at people with fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and at doctors who practise complementary medicine. Mannatech’s claims for Ambrotose were particularly compelling, due to the apparent existence of an independent, Government-funded scientific research study, published in a medical journal, proving its effectiveness.
This study was said to have been funded by the USA National Institutes of Health, and conducted at the prestigious University of California Irvine Medical School (UCI). The author, Associate Clinical Professor Dr Darryl See, was already known as an immunologist with an interest in CFS.
The results were published in a paper entitled "An in vitro screening study of 196 natural products for toxicity and efficacy" in the Journal of the American Nutraceutical Association (JANA) in February 1999...
The JANA paper and See’s credentials bestowed an aura of scientific respectability that was exploited to the full in Mannatech’s promotions. Then, only six months after its publication, Mannatech dropped Dr See like a hot potato ... and threatened to sue for fraud. Distributors were warned not to mention him or his research...
In March 1999, following the publication of the JANA paper, Dr See went on a tour of Australia (where laws are less restrictive as far as selling bogus health products) to promote Mannatech and recruit new distributors and customers. When questions arose about why he was out touring, instead of being back in California at the university, See claimed that it was more important for him to be spreading the message about this new miracle product, and Mannatech claimed that See was "taking a hiatus to write, educate and publish the results of his research".
However, it would later emerge that he had resigned from his University post in September the previous year, before the results of his study were published.
In August 1999, the Orange County Register and the Los Angeles Times carried stories that See’s work was under investigation at UCI. They said he had been asked to resign following internal audits into the conduct of some of his previous research - there had been allegations of conflict of interest, and he had broken research rules. Now the publication of the JANA study had alerted the Medical School to the fact that See was still representing himself as a faculty member there, and they also had questions about the study itself. They had never heard of it - as the Orange County Register of August 6 put it, "The university has no record of the grant or the research".
...See [wrote to] JANA on August 3, 1999 to set matters straight. He admitted that he was not affiliated with UCI when he submitted the article to the journal, that his wife "distributed, resold and/or recommended in her practice products from several of the companies with products in the study", and that he himself "was a paid consultant to one of the companies with products evaluated in the study at the time of the manuscript preparation".
In other words, he was working for Mannatech and his wife was a Mannatech distributor. According to one newspaper report, he had already received over $100,000 for his services...
I also found an interesting forum,
The Complaint Station, which has a
thread discussing Mannatech. The first post is from March 2004 by a person in a similar situation to Kitty's blogger, who writes:
... I'm tired of carnival people and their ** enemas and the rest. Shame on any of you for putting your damn pyramids in place and not caring about human beings. Money hungry b******s.
There were about a dozen responses, last one in June 2004, a majority (unfortunately) being defenses of Mannatech.
The most interesting pair of links I found were to 2 sites,
Mannatech -- Fraud and
Mannatech -- Scam. As you will see if you click on either link, what you get sent to is a site
promoting Mannatech products!
MANNATECH SCAM
Low Cost Glyconutrients Direct From Mannatech
Order Ambrotose & all your Mannatech products here at below wholesale pricing. Complete product descriptions & ingredients.
www.LowestCostStore.com
Bizarre! I can sort of see the sense to having google-listings under Mannatech-Fraud and Mannatech-Scam, so that even people a little dubious about the product are going to get sent to a sale site rather than an expose site, but putting
SCAM in big, capitalized letters at the top of the page seems a little counter-productive. Maybe I'm misreading something... Is this a common practice?
