Homeopathic Teething Gels May Pose Risks

As a retired certified medical transcriptionist & teacher of medical terminology in both private & medical school university settings for over 20 years, I hope the FDA has a closer look at the complaints to rule out other etiologies in the differential diagnosis; e.g., many teething babies are undergoing vaccinations during this same time period.

The problem is, the article only really identifies two real potential side effects: seizures and lethargy. While seizures are a very serious medical condition, this article does not say if the seizures are directly attributable to the teething tablets. In fact a lot of medications have seizures of a side effect. Vaccines for example are pushed by ALL government health agencies and in MI, 3 of the 6 required vaccines for school aged children save "seizures" plainly listed as a side effect on the CDC website. Does that mean we should pull all the vaccines and medicines that have seizures as a side effect? No. Of course not. These medications are important and as stated on the CDC website these side effects are so rare it is hard to tell if they are caused by the vaccine. So what is to say that lethargy and seizures are directly caused by the teething gels/tablets? How many children are having seizures or are experiencing lethargy after using these products VS the ones who are using it and are having no side effects? Why recall this product and not all medicines with seizure or lethargy side effects?

I have always understood that homeopathy is quackery.

If we want to call the FDA's actions to protect consumers from harm a witch hunt, so be it. We need more of that kind of hunting, not less, because of the dirty politics that allowed supplements to escape regulation. Because of that, at worst the public gets to be the canary in the coal mine. At best, the sellers of supplements are separating the public from its money through fraudulent and deceptive claims that are shielded from scrutiny unless people start dropping dead.

Why are we treating it here with the sort of awe and reverence usually reserved for religious beliefs?

Maybe the children were given other remedies for teething pain in conjunction with the homeopathic. Advil? Tylenol? My two year old had a seizure after the pediatrician recommended Robitussinit for a persistent cough. A couple of years later it was labeled as not being for children under six.
NYT has had several articles on this type of thing over the last ten years.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/rethinking-remedies-for-colds-a...

Yes, homeopathic medicine is designed to be diluted until the original substance is almost non-existent. The problem is that some homeopathic drug manufacturers, as beholden to shareholders as any businesspeople, have been adding actual medicine to their elixirs in order to improve sales. Here is a link to an article about company that was found by the FDA to have added "penicillin or derivatives of it" to a homeopathic cold medicine. These "medicines" are unregulated and untested. Stay away from them.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2014/03/homeopathy

Homeopathic treatments can have side effects and cause harm. There are reports of infants having seizures after using a certain homeopathic remedy so the FDA is investigating if there is a link which is obviously the responsible and reasonable thing to do.

You are ill informed if you think that homeopathic remedies do not have the ability to cause harm. All substances have that ability because guess what homeopathic remedies are made of chemicals just like other medications. I highly recommend reading the article I've attached.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2013/0...

The FDA ignores a vast number of products that don't contain anything remotely close to what's on the label, and others that truly are dangerous to go after homeopathic teething tabs? Dumbfounding.

The FDA: overreaching as normal. The FDA by law has no jurisdiction over supplements. While it's great that they're trying to be more relevant, that's not their job.

Belladonna is a poison! I can't believe that a parent would want to give any amount of it to an infant.

This would be funny if it were not so tragic. Allopathic medications are all toxic and generally of little use anyway for teething problems. Homeopathic medications are non-toxic and of great use because they can be safely given to babies.
And sorry guys, you can't have it both ways, if Homeopathy is basically placebo, as Allopathic medicine likes to claim, then how can it produce seizures???????????????????
And if Homeopathic medicine is not pure placebo, as Homeopathic doctors know, then it will only demonstrate effect in benign ways and cannot produce seizures.

I don’t know the specifics that prompted this FDA alert but I don’t trust the FDA, too much conflict of interest with big Pharma. I am a nurse and I have seen homeopathic medicines provide dramatic improvements in a wide variety of illnesses for pediatric patients as well as adults, and the beauty of homeopathic medicines is that they provide these benefits without the damaging side effects of so many conventional pharmaceuticals. I suspect this is another attempt to undermine natural therapies which have been increasing in popularity. If these products had been proven dangerous I am sure they would have been recalled.

This is part of FDA's witch hunt against homeopathy. Teething tablets have been around forever and cannot cause the harm that FDA claims. In fact, homeopathic remedies have been repeatedly accused of being nothing more than placebos. Now which is it? Are they nothing but water or dangerous drugs that can cause seizures. The problem is that FDA doesn't have the foggiest understanding of homeopathy and, by default, assumes they are just like drugs and should be treated like drugs. Problem is that if we treated all drugs by the standard applied here to teething tablets, there would be no more drugs left on the market at all. The double standard and bias of FDA is grossly apparent.

If there is a bad batch of medicine it should be recalled, although it has not yet been established that such is the case. It should be noted that homeopathic remedies are the safest medicines on the market and the only ones that both pregnant women and babies can be treated with safely. In the most common potencies sold over the counter, they do not contain any of the original substance, but rather the energetic imprint of it, which is sufficient to trigger a response from the immune system. Homeopathic remedies work not by loading the body with chemicals, as conventional drugs do, but by signaling the body to heal itself. The method has been so successful that it is used by 500 million people around the world, including many thousands of board certified medical doctors.

The FDA needs to step it up and regulate herbals. People don't realize that there is no guarantee of quality, or strength of this supplements.

Heck, throw out homeopathic anything. It starts with a plant that has some kind of mystical, mythical connection to your problem, then dilutes it so many times that there is hardly anything left but water that supposedly remembers having it around.