Miraculous skin patches | “People are blinded by this science”

The emergency meeting is called on Zoom. Barely an hour after the broadcast of a very critical report on the show The bill, The founder of The SuperPatch Company, Jay Dhaliwal, wants to be reassuring to his Quebec sales team.

“We’re going to have to train ourselves on how we use language,” the businessman insists. Now, SuperPatch’s salespeople will have to hammer home this message: the effectiveness of “vibrotactile technology” in alleviating pain and sleep disturbances has been demonstrated in “scientific” articles published in Anesthesia & Pain Journal and theInternational Journal of Family Medicine & Healthcare.

“It’s not a miracle. It’s 15 years of research, $22 million in investment. It’s true, it’s true, it’s true!” Mr. Dhaliwal swears in this video interview from April, obtained by The Press.

Promoters of the SuperPatch patches, launched with great fanfare the previous month in Dallas, claim that they can treat a wide range of ailments – pain, fatigue, stress, even erectile dysfunction – even though the product contains no active medication.

It is a simple embossed design, similar to a QR code, that is stuck to the skin, which would transmit by “vibrotactile” effect a signal to the nervous system causing all sorts of positive effects.

The first two clinical studies to look at the product’s effectiveness were fully funded by Srysty Holding, Mr. Dhaliwal’s company that markets the SuperPatch patches. They concluded, based on questionnaires each completed by more than 100 participants, that SuperPatch’s “technology” has “incredible potential” when combined with the use of other therapeutic methods.

“Predatory magazines”

The two journals that published them are owned by SciVision Publishers, an open-access scientific publisher (open access) registered in Delaware, a state that allows anonymous business registration. The publisher’s Facebook, LinkedIn and X accounts each have fewer than 100 followers.

“These articles are published in journals that are clearly predatory,” says Vincent Larivière, professor at the School of Library Science at the University of Montreal and holder of the UNESCO Chair on Open Science.

The term “predatory journals,” little known to the public and even to scientists, refers to publications for which authors only have to pay a sum to be assured of publication. They often have names that resemble those of prestigious journals, assure that each article is submitted to a peer review committee, but “they publish anything,” often with extremely short deadlines that demonstrate the absence of serious evaluation, summarizes Mr. Larivière.

They are frequently used by researchers from developing countries, who have very little chance of being published in major journals. “There are also cases where charlatans try to give themselves an aura of legitimacy by publishing in pseudoscientific journals,” explains Mr. Larivière, himself co-author of a study on predatory journals that was published in 2021 in Nature.

Jonathan Jarry, a science communicator at McGill’s Office for Science and Society, points out that two of the four reports praising the virtues of SuperPatch in Anesthesia & Pain Research and theInternational Journal of Family Medicine & Healtcare do not include a control group, to see if the patch has a different effect than a simple placebo. “We have no idea what would have happened without the intervention,” he summarizes.

The studies also specify that they excluded from the analysis all data from participants who did not complete the 14-day clinical trial planned in the methodology.

In two subsequent studies, the independent company that conducted the research, Clarity Science, added a small control group of 20 people. According to Eduardo Franco, a professor in McGill’s department of oncology who was one of the first scientists to sound the alarm about predatory journals in Quebec, the conclusions are nevertheless based on a “very poor set of observational studies” and a flawed non-randomized methodology. “These papers would not have been accepted in reputable academic journals,” he says.

SuperPatch, Jay Dhaliwal and SciVision Publishers did not respond to requests for an interview for this article. Peter Hurwitz, president of Clarity Science, said the papers are “interim analyses” that have been submitted to peer review committees, which have agreed to publish them after review.

“People who sell products like this understand that the public wants to have some scientific validity, but at the same time, they know that the public lacks the scientific literacy to understand the value of it,” says Jarry. “People are blinded by this science.”

The author “invited” to a scientific conference

In its field presentations, SuperPatch doesn’t bother with these details. During a conference given to about fifty people in Brossard last April, one of its star representatives, Éric Laquerre, maintained that the results of the studies were “so interesting” that researcher Peter Hurwitz was invited to “talk about this technology” at the 12^e World Institute of Pain Congress, Turkey, 2023.

Pfizer and Moderna representatives at the conference “had to hear a gentleman talk about a little pantyhose that has nothing in it, no ingredients, no drugs, no supplements, and that manages pain for 24 hours. He didn’t make many friends at that conference,” Laquerre quipped, celebrating the natural virtues of SuperPatch.

A photo showing the researcher behind a lectern, brandishing a SuperPatch stamp in front of an audience, has circulated on social networks to prove this.

But in fact, the researcher was never among the speakers invited to give a talk at the event. The conference program indicates that Mr. Hurwitz was invited only to present a brief summary of the SuperPatch research in the form of posters (abstract posters).

“The posters will be displayed in a central location allowing them to be viewed throughout the day during coffee and lunch breaks,” the conference program states.

“During some of the poster presentation periods, there was an opportunity to answer questions from other medical professionals in the audience,” Hurwitz explained in response to a question from The Press on the misleading nature of the photo which shows him in front of a lectern displaying a SuperPatch stamp.

The D^r Jeffrey Mogil, a McGill pain specialist who was actually invited to speak at the conference, has no memory of SuperPatch being at the event. “I pay very little attention to salespeople at conferences,” he admits, adding that he has “absolutely no doubt” that it’s a scam.