Yes, it is a Friday as I write this, and so I’m leaning away a bit from my usual postings into something that is a bit different. Well yes, penis enlargement is not exactly my normal focus, there is however a strange story here.
Via a Sexual Medicine Journal, the International Journal of Impotence Research, we have the following retraction of a published paper.
Retraction Note: Effects of chronic treatment with the eNOS stimulator Impaza on penis length and sexual behaviors in rats with a high baseline of sexual activity
The retraction published June 23, 2020, explains what the problem is.
The editor has retracted this article because there are concerns about the scientific validity of the study. Specifically, the reagent is diluted beyond the point to which any active molecules are expected to be present and there is no molecular analysis to support the presence of molecules at these dilutions. These concerns have caused the editor to lose faith in the reliability of the findings.
What exactly is Impaza?
If you googled it and read this, then it comes across as a serious drug …
Pharmacodynamics: IMPAZA enhances the activity of endothelial nitric oxide (NO) synthase, restores production of NO by the endothelium under sexual stimulation, increases concentration of cyclic guanosine monophosphate (cGMP) in smooth muscles and facilitates their relaxation, which leads to increased blood inflow to the cavernous bodies.
… but that’s not exactly an honest description of what it is at all.
Presenting it like that is perhaps why it got through peer-review. It was only later realised what it actually was, hence the retraction.
Impaza is actually manufactured by Materia Medica Holding, a Russian company. They advise that Impaza has …
No adverse effects or overdosage have been reported in patients receiving prolonged Impaza therapy courses, so it is categorized as an over-the-counter drug
There is a reason for that.
It is not medicine, it is not even a potent medication at all. The Russian producer is a company that describes themselves as follows …
Established in 1992 Materia Medica Holding launched first in Russia mass production of homeopathic medicines and made it available for a wide range of customers.
Side Note: “materia medica” is a term used in Homeopathy.
Let Me briefly explain what Homeopathy actually is
You take a tiny amount of a substance and dilute it with 100 parts of water. You then take one part of that mixture and add it to 100 parts of water. That’s a 2C mix. You then take one part of that 2C and add it to 100 parts of water. Keep going because you are on a logarithmic dilution journey.
It is common for many Homeopathy medications to be 20C, but many go way beyond that. Basically the net effect is that there is not one single molecule of the original substance left.
It sounds weird, but does it work?
Short answer: no.
Slightly longer answer … many clinical trials have rather robustly established that it does not. (Some dubious studies do make claims, but dig and you find flaws)
Quackery
In other words this is pure undiluted quackery. Materia are running a scam. Yes there are many who sincerely believe Homeopathy works, but Materia are not openly promoting Homeopathy. Instead they cover that up and present Homeopathy remedies (that contain no active substances at all) as conventional drugs and obscure what they are really selling.
In other words, you also can buy a packet of sugar pills that do nothing at all for $32.35 …
Nothing produced by them will actually do what they claim it can do, and none of it has any credible scientific basis. That’s because everything they produce is highly diluted and is in effect nothing at all.
If you google Impaza, you will find ads from people selling this stuff with bold claims. What they don’t tell you is that it is Homeopathy because that is now commonly recognised as a red flag warning.
If you asked the NHS (hint: real doctors) about Homeopathy, then you quickly discover that it simply does not work …
Homeopathy is a “treatment” based on the use of highly diluted substances, which practitioners claim can cause the body to heal itself.
A 2010 House of Commons Science and Technology Committee report on homeopathy said that homeopathic remedies perform no better than placebos (dummy treatments).
The review also said that the principles on which homeopathy is based are “scientifically implausible“.
This is also the view of the Chief Medical Officer, Professor Dame Sally Davies.
Who did this study on IMPAZA?
As highlighted here by Discover …
As Panchin has exposed, Impaza is just one of the products sold by the Russian company OOO “NPF ‘Materia Medica Holding.’” Of the seven authors on the Chu et al. Impaza paper, five were affiliated with this company, who produce a number of hyper-diluted therapeutics.
Materia Medica refer to these products as Release Active Drugs (RADs), but as far as I can see, “homeopathy” would be an equally accurate title. Materia Medica have already suffered the retraction of a number of papers on another one of their products, Ergoferon, e.g. this one and this one.
In other words, folks associated with the Russian company are frantically striving to generate papers within credible science journals.
Within this latest study they have very deliberately obscured all references to Impaza being a Homeopathy remedy and presented it in a manner that creates an illusion. They were calling it “A compound stimulating endothelial nitric oxide synthase,” which makes it sound very much like a conventional drug.
They clearly know that Homeopathy is a red flag, hence strove to hide that from the peer-reviewers to get the paper published.
In the end somebody tipped off the journal that they needed to take a closer look. Once they did and the penny dropped, the paper was retracted and so it joins the pile of all the other papers associated with Materia Medica that have been retracted.
As for Rat Penis Enlargement, there are going to be rather a lot of very disappointed rats. The size of ones member is something that some might stretch the truth about, and so the irony of finding that a claim about a Penis Enlargement medication has also been over inflated and exaggerated is not exactly lost on me.