Australia pulls some Nurofen products over misleading claims | Hacker News Reader

Australia pulls some Nurofen products over misleading claims

bbc.co.uk

30 pointsDanBC27 comments

The manufacturer took their standard product - ibuprofen - and repackaged it for different ailments under their brand name. So they had a Nurofen Back Pain, Nurofen Period Pain, Nurofen Migraine Pain and Nurofen Tension Headache. They then sold these for much more than their normal nurofen product.

The Australian court ruled that this market segmentation was not legal.

However care should be taken in expanding this to other products: in the discussion on /r/australia a commenter noted that the active ingredient(s) may not be the only issue at hand and provided the example of panadol's "osteo" whose active ingredient is standard paracetamol but which is packaged as a partially sustained release tablet (2/3 of the paracetamol is delivered over something like 8 hours)

This is especially interesting when you consider that the basic product (Nurofen) is already a [massive scam / triumph of branding] (delete according to personal opinion).

There's a very strange bug in human programming that we still fall for this stuff so easily.

Branding used to be (and still is) very important in an unregulated market. If there's a high chance that rival products are ineffective (or poisonous) then you have a damned good incentive to stick to your trusted brand.

In a regulated market where a £0.30 pack of generic ibuprofen is literally the same thing as a £2.00 pack of Nurofen, there should be no reason for Nurofen to even exist. In a rational world it wouldn't exist.

I guess the advertising & branding industry really hasn't existed for all that long in terms of human civilisation. Maybe we will gradually wise up to this sort of thing?

Quite. I can even feel the branding working on me even though I know it is rubbish. The nice shiny foil pack versus the plain basic package. The thought that perhaps the big company will have better quality control. I suppose complicating the matter is the placebo effect, especially as it is the area of pain relief which is the poster child for the efficacy of placebo.

The big company might well have better quality control (though, depending on the regulatory environment, you may have very good grounds to believe that everyone's quality control is good enough) -- but it seems unlikely that the same big company has better quality control for one product than for another identical product in different packaging.

But not impossible. You could imagine that they do some kind of tests on their pills, and put the "better" batches in the fancier packaging with the higher prices. I doubt it, though. (Though I bet such things do happen in other less tightly regulated markets.)

One area where it happens is electrical components; for instance, if you buy a bunch of 10kΩ ±5% reistors and measure their actual resistance, you should find a nice distribution with a big hole around exactly 10kΩ; those resistors were taken from the batch and sold as ±1% (or better) tolerance. But it shouldn't happen with drugs, I doubt there are "grades" of acceptable quality.

You're right about the placebo effect, I'm sure I once read about a study that found patients reported better pain relief from the pills with fancy packaging. As you said, we're dealing with pain relief which is inherently subjective, so the placebo effect matters.

My girlfriend is a doctor, and often goes for the branded versions, saying they will be better quality, and absorbed better.

I have read before that good quality vitamin pills are bigger so that they crumble / break down and get absorbed better that hard compact ones.

People fall for it because they don't know better. Nurofen treats headaches/migraines/whatever, ibuprofen... what the hell is ibuprofen, the doctor did not prescribe that!

I've seen so many people take overpriced multivitamins and specific brands for cold/fever when they could've taken generic paracetamol or bodybuilder supplement vitamins (much cheaper and higher dosages) that I don't even care anymore.

Either educate yourself and do some research or pay for the safe, overpriced brand.

Nurofen's manufacturer also sponsors medical conferences which use a large yellow sun with giant gradiated halos (ie, the Nurofen branding) throughout the conference materials without mentioning the name 'Nurofen' as they are legally forbidden from doing so.

I had a conversation with my pharmacist about this recently and you are essentially correct.

The active drug is identical, but the material used to make may be different and the coating may be different also. So a branded off the shelf tablet may, due to how it's made and the extra markup (Xofen Xtreme Pain relief) get to work 5-10 minutes before the generic version, or it may taste sweeter and be easier to swallow for children, be in gel form etc.

It's worth noting that this is different from the types in the article - https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/court-finds-nurofen-ma... where products like Nurofen Period pain and Nurofen Migrane were the exact same thing.

Also the placebo effect is powerful, so maybe we shouldn't dismiss it as just marketing.

Fillers and method of delivery can and do often differ between generics and name brand drugs. Though in practice very few people are really affected by that.

I'd say this is true is most cases. In the US, generic drugs only need to be 80% to 125% bio-equivalent (AUC, peak concentration, etc). For most drugs that's fine.

However, there have been a few that have gotten recalled because they weren't bioequivalent. Wellbutrin is a great example. It took the FDA a couple years to finally force the manufacturer to redo the tests and fix the problem.

The HN title is incorrect because it elides the "product" part of the original. Australia didn't pull nurofen itself, they pulled nurofen-branded products which made unsustained claims ("Back Pain", "Period Pain", "Migraine Pain" and "Tension Headache" which were bog-standard nurofen formulation with different branding and significant markup)

'Nurofen' is a brand. 'Ibuprofen' is the commonly used name here for the active ingredient. Bog-standard Nurofen is still a marked-up, branded product containing a generic drug.

> 'Nurofen' is a brand.

Nurofen is both a brand and a specific product, the old title made it look like the specific product itself or even the whole brand had been pulled, neither of which is correct.

> Bog-standard Nurofen is still a marked-up, branded product containing a generic drug.

True as that might be, it doesn't make misleading claims and hasn't been pulled, only 4 specific sub-products of the brand have been.

Sorry, I edited the title.

I wonder if people would be interested in a greed index, whereby companies are rated in terms of illegal/ greedy activity and scored.

An app can be used to scan barcodes of products to lookup their greediness.

I would like to think that consumers are reaching a point where they're starting to care about buying products from ethical companies.

Money talks.

I like this idea. It seems to me that we are seeing more and more egregious examples of companies pushing their luck with how far they can exploit their customers' loyalty.

The difficulty would be in defining an objective "greed index".

I hope you're right that we're reaching a tipping point in customer attitudes. I find it depressing that companies seem to get away with this stuff so easily.

The greed index doesn't need to be objective, it merely needs to agree reasonably well with users' values. It seems plausible that users of such an app would agree well enough for it to be workable.

Alternatively, instead of reporting a numerical index report a summary of complaints made against the company. Downsides: more stuff to read; still subjective; maybe more risk of lawsuits from complained-about companies.

I listened to a Hanselminutes podcast with the founder of iFixit today - it seems like for electronic products, the repairability / planned obsolescence of products should be a factor in a greed index

I love the idea, but sadly I'm reminded of existence of sales and marketing. They'll game the shit out of that index, just like they do with everything else that matters.

I believe there's some evidence that more expensive placebos work better than cheaper ones. It's entirely possible that these segmented Nurofen products really were more effective in treating the particular things they were allegedly for even though the actual pills were identical.

as an australian citizen I am interested to know - would this be a ruling a company could push for compensation on under the TPP?

Strangely, knowing all we know about the placebo effect, it's likely that those overpriced non-targeted versions did help people more than either the plain version or the genetic. Weird world.

It works even when you know about it.

I only buy nurofen because it works for me better than the generic. There is no reason for that, I know there is no reason for that, I know I'm an idiot overpaying, I don't have pride or anything, I would be glad to have the generic work as well and I try from time to time. But it does not matter, I'm conditioned and I fear that the cost of unconditioning me would make Nurofen works like the generic rather than the other way around.

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