It has been
brought to my attention that a company selling some so-called colon cleansing product wanted to threat with a law suit a Romanian skeptical blogger because he wrote some articles showing that any such products (the one produced by the said company is the most known/popular in Romania) are pure quackery and there is no scientific basis for the claim they make in order to promote their products.
In his articles he also explained how, in fact, the mucoid plaque, the thing that supposedly proves the efficiency of the product, it is a result of taking the product due to its ingredients, and how no such mucoid plaque was ever observed in any colonoscopy, colon surgery or any other situation where you'd expect it to be seen. He also quoted specialists and lots of other scientific references, showing an honest approach to the issue.
As a response to the initial take-down message from the company doing business with people's crap, the blogger said would like to see scientific proof for the claims made for the product, and when that was to happen, he would take down the articles and publish a correction.
The company decided that the best way to continue this was to try to make a legal threat and ask 100.000 euros (one hundred thousands Euros) as damage in a country where, according to the latest data from the National Statistics Institute, the total average monthly personal income is about 180 Euros.
The blogger, as a reply, decided the threat should be made public and wrote another article which probably made the company very unhappy, because they decided
to sue Wordpress so they would take down the blog.
And that's exactly what they did, they sued Wordpress, and sent some documents to Wordpress who sent them to the blogger. Among the documents there were 4 pdf files containing each an original article (in Romanian) from the blog and only 3 pdf containg English translation for only 3 of them. The one missing was the one where the blogger himself showed there wasn't any legal basis for the threats they made initially against him.
Here are the translations (ironically, made on the company's own expense):
Initial article entitled "ColonHelp doesn't help the colon. But it empties your wallet!" (original
here)
Initial Article.en
The second article entitled "Again about ColonHelp and intestinal cleansers" (original
here)
Follow Up.en
** Missing translation of the first reply to threats (original Romanian text
here)
The second article about the threats entitled "People who clean the colon have filled the fan with shit" (original
here)
Threats 2
The Romanian blogger explains himself more of the details on this issue in his latest article on his blog.
The company is called Zenyth Pharmaceuticals and Wordpress will probably lose the lawsuit by not presenting themselves in any way in the Romanian courts, but I think some Streisand effect would really help the asses of this company to get them kicked in their rightful place, at the top of the hall of shame.
The product name is called ColonHelp.
Please spread this information as wide as possible.
Do NOT link to the company's site (it would raise its search engine rank), but link to the blogger' article or the translations.
If any Romanian speaker cares to translate the untranslated article and publish it somewhere on the web, I would be more than glad to update this article and add a link to that translation.
