Cold-FX involved in lawsuit for being no better than placebo

If you thought Cold-FX was going to fix that bug on time for race day, you may just have thought wrong. Several are claiming that the well-known cold remedy is nothing more than a gimmick– and lawyer John Green is going after the drug company in a lawsuit to prove it.

The current Cold-FX manufacturer, Valeant, is currently involved in a lawsuit brought to the B.C. Supreme Court. According to a recent article in The Huffington Post, makers of Cold-FX have known for over a decade that the medicine is a hoax.

RELATED: The runner’s guide to surviving cold and flu season

RELATED: Should you run when you are sick

Green told Huffington that this lawsuit is about a pharmaceutical company putting a medication on the market fully knowing that it is incapable of doing what the bottle claims it does. If his lawsuit goes well, Green wants consumers who have bought and relied on Cold-FX to get their money back.

The case is going on now but was filed in B.C. in 2012 with another filed in Saskatchewan. The cold medication was not always owned by Valeant– it was sold by Alexa Life Sciences in 2011. Apparently, the medicine’s former owner knew that it didn’t do what it claimed to do as far back as 2004.

That’s the year that Dr. Gerry Predy led a study looking into the medicinal benefits of taking Cold-FX. The results have never been released to the public– such is not required by Canadian law says The Huffington Post.

What is known to the public? Apparently the only medicinal ingredient in the little pills is American ginseng– an ingredient found in several types of tea.

Furthermore, a spokesperson of Cold-FX has gone on record saying the medicine only works when taken liberally for as long as eight weeks– much longer than your average cold.