How To Identify Medical Scams

By Kenya Campos


There are millions of people who are looking for a miracle cure for one ailment or another every day. They have many times explored the medicinal solutions and found them to be too expensive or ineffective in treating the problems they have. Other people are taken in by products that promise to prevent diseases such as cancer or heart disease. Medical scams prey on these individuals and their fears by offering magic cures and preventive products that can keep them healthy.

Most of the cures will be prefaced by stating they are all natural, previously unknown, something your doctor is hiding from you or recently re-discovered in an ancient civilization. The items most often advertised deal with enlargement of the penis, restoring lost hair, losing massive amounts of weight and those always present online pharmacies that can get anything you want with or without a prescription. The thing these things have in common is that they deal with conditions that have no cures.

The weight loss business generates over forty billion dollars a year and most of the supplements and appetite suppressants fall into the scam description. They may offer a pill that causes weight loss without any significant changes in your lifestyle or eating habits but the truth is to lose weight and keep it off you must reduce your caloric intake and increase the amount of exercise you do on a daily basis.

Fake pharmacies found online are the worst kind of scam artists. They operate by preying on desperate people who either cannot afford to pay retail for their prescriptions or by promising to deliver medications without prescriptions. The medications that are sent may be expired, foreign made or even totally fraudulent with no medicinal properties at all.

Many fake online pharmacies will contact potentially new clients through spam e-mail messages. Some of them are simply fronts for criminal access to your credit information or for loading up your computer with malicious spy ware and key loggers. They target people who are seriously ill with incurable diseases such as diabetes, cancer, HIV or AIDS.

The fake pharmacies use various tricks to bypass your spam filters. They deliberately misspell words, place unrelated information in the subject line or use fake identities in the sender names. The best way to avoid accidentally accessing one of these sites is to never open any e-mail that is not from someone you know.

There are legitimate pharmacies online and they will have complete contact information listed on their sites. They will also not send prescription drugs without the proper paperwork required by law. Most fake pharmacies do not give out their contact information and will usually promise the drugs you want without a prescription.

Some people will turn to miracle cures for answers to health issues. By doing this they may be jeopardizing their health in much more serious ways because they delay receiving effective treatment that their doctors can offer.




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