Disappointed by Marvel

Quite frankly, I’m rather disappointed by Marvel. With the dvd of their most recent movie, The Avengers, I found an advertisement for “Colantotte’s Megatitan NEO Legend.” Now, if they promoted it as simply merchandise for the movie (which is one way it is advertised as), I wouldn’t have a problem with it. However, there are two comments, that I think is misleading, and they are as follows.

“Approved as a medical device by the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare”

What makes it misleading, is that looking at the site of the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare, and searching for Colantotte, ANSPO (I’ll mention why that one is important later on), and “Megatitan NEO Legend” turned up no results. Now, to be fair, I looked up things that might show up, specifically, Morphine, Oxytocin, Paracetamol, and magnet. The first three were to find out if specific drugs would show up, and all of them did (particular variants of the third, Advil and Tylenol didn’t however). For the last one, a few results did come up for magnet. Among them, two were on the subject of foods produced by recombinant DNA techniques, two, while discussing the subject of magnets didn’t make any mention of Colantotte, or any related searches, and the final one was an MS EXCEL spreadsheet (which didn’t load). While the two that were most likely to make reference to it in regards to being an approved product were in Japanese, one did provide websites in English which could be searched. Once again, no results. So I looked at the website (http://www.colantotte.eu/tf/AboutUs), and found this at the bottom of the page

“Approved Class 1 Medical Device”

Hey, finally getting somewhere. This lead to looking on the MHLW’s website for that class of medical devices.http://www.mhlw.go.jp/english/wp/wp-hw5/dl/23010231e.pdfWhere it gets funny. Class one devices, Under Regulatory Requirements, quote (http://www.std.pmda.go.jp/scripts/stdDB/pubeng/stdDB_pubeng_regulation.cgi) “Approval of the product is not required, but marketing notification is necessary.”
So, basically, if it does absolutely nothing, with no adverse reactions in the case that it malfunctions or serious side effects, it can be approved as a medical device, “and is allowed to launch a medical device onto the Japanese market by submitting the marketing notification for the medical device to PMDA.”

So, the question is, does it actually do anything? Well, here’s where they shoot themselves in the foot, and its the second comment.

“Colantotte products use axially magnetized magnets in a unique Alternating North-South Polarity Orientation (ANSPO) to maximize the magnetic field flow.”

No details for what it actually does medically? You know, the type of thing you’d want to know if it was “approved as a medical device by the Japanese MHLW”? So, more looking. It lead me to this part of their site (http://www.colantotte.eu/tc/MagneticTherapy). What I found

“…deemed a ‘no health risk’ by the World Health Organisation.”

So, why is Magnetic Therapy deemed a ‘no health risk’ by the WHO? A search on the WHO website for Magnetic Therapy produced seven results (http://search.who.int/search?q=%22Magnetic+therapy%22&ie=utf8&site=default_collection&client=_en&proxystylesheet=_en&output=xml_no_dtd&oe=utf8). Unfortunately, among them, I couldn’t find anything on statements regarding the health risk, or the basis for it. After some more looking, from what I can gather, the likely basis is that there is no effect when it comes to health, either positive or negative, for Magnetic Therapy.

So, why am I disappointed by Marvel? I’ll summarize it. For permitting Colantotte to advertise the product as though it has any sort of medical effect, as indicated by “Approved as a medical device” with no qualifiers. I certainly hope nobody will consider buying it for medical use without bothering to look into claims like that.