Popular and heavily advertised fungus remedies

There are many "alternative treatments" around that you see advertised everywhere whenever you browse the web to read on the subject of onychomycosis, ringworm of the nail, or whatever one chooses to call one's nail fungus. Examples include funginix, zetaclear and nonyx nail gel. Let's look at a couple of these.

Nonyx nail gel is manufactured by the Xenna corporation and seems to sell quite well. Here are the ingredients according to their own website:

* Deionized Water,
* Ethanoic Acid,
* Xanthan Gum,
* Fragrance

Deionized sounds fancy, but the thing is it is basically just clean water. Water that has gone through filters to remove any minerals in it, it is about as clean as distilled water but cheaper to produce in large quantities.

In short: it’s just water.

Ethanoic acid also sound fancy. Thing is: it is just another name for acetic acid. And acetic acid happens to be:

Household vinegar. So they could have just written “vinegar”.

Xanthan gum sounds really interesting and I had to check it out. This happens to be a normal, common food additive that is used for raising the viscosity of a fluid, in simple words: It is used for making stuff thicker. Kinda like gelatine in jello.

So what we are supposed to pay for here is really: Water, vinegar, thickener, all of which you probably have in your kitchen. And some perfume for the scent… 30-40 dollars for this.

I would not call this a scam since vinegar actually does clear away keratin debris buildup and seems to be able to kill fungal spores in the nail. But it is ridiculously expensive for a water-vinegar mixture and it is obvious why they choose not to write "common vinegar" on the bottle.

Zetaclear:

Zetaclear is a huge presence in the googlesphere, but as any other of these "treatments" it is not proven to be efficient in any studies whatsoever, consumers have nothing to base their opinion upon except the company's own information, and that information is false.

And there is a problem: Zetaclear is being marketed extremely aggressively and in a dishonest way. Google "zetaclear" and you get dozens (!) of URLs such as www.zetaclearwarning.com and www.zetaclearreviewssite.com . All of these are scams and it is very obvious as the so-called "reviews" are extremely shameless in their praise of the product. you can also find tests that claim to be objective but they also are manufactured to make Zetaclear look good. The internet image of Zetaclear is carefully designed to make it seem like it gets everything from ecstatic tales of success from customers to sound and sensible positive feedback from serious sources. Look around, browse around, it is ridiculous, the energy and time the people behind zetaclear has put in to create all these websites.


AND it is a homeopathic remedy. As most people know by now, homeopathic treatments are water with no active substance in it, and it 100 % unsuccessful in treating anything apart from its placebo-effect. If you think it will cure your muscle tensions, you may relax, and praise the treatment. But it is still just water, and you are fooled. They are always diluted to the point that you would need to drink the atlantic ocean full of the liquid to get even one molecule of the claimed ingredients in your mouth.

It does actually contain something though, 10 % Undecylenic Acid, which is an older substance and not as effective as newer stuff like griseofulvin and terbinafine, but at least it is there, and can be effective. http://faculty.swosu.edu/scott.long/phcl/antifung.htm


Not much more to say about it, Zetaclear is the most obvious scam of them all. On http://lee.org/blog/2009/05/02/zetaclear/ there is a discussion between people who are frustrated by this shameless and elaborate scam, drop by and comment. The company behind zetaclear are making a profit off people's desperate wishes to get well.