Nyloxin

Most people spend their lives trying not to get bitten by a poisonous snake. If only they knew about the purported therapeutic effects of snake venom.

The marketers of Nyloxin want to spread the word about what it views as the myriad health benefits of cobra venom, the active ingredient in its homeopathic product. But the FDA isn’t having it.

Earlier this month, the FDA sent Nyloxin a warning letter in which it cited 20 Only FDA-approved drugs can be marketed as having the ability to diagnose, cure, treat, prevent or mitigate a disease. appearing on the company’s website and Facebook and Twitter pages. Despite the FDA’s warning, which carried the threat of legal action, many of these claims still linger on the Nyloxin site, including this one from a “Research & Studies” page:

Nyloxin is supported by significant clinical evidence consisting of 46 human clinical studies and 20 pre-clinical studies documenting the effectiveness of cobra venom for the treatment of various types of pain, including cancer pain, chronic pain, neuralgia, and pain associated with parkinsons (sic), arthritis, and herpes zoster.

Interesting note on these “46 human clinical studies”: Half of them were published before 1960, according to dates provided. The most recent one was published in 2007.

Even if cobra venom could do all these things (and let’s just say we’re skeptical), Nyloxin would need to have product studies, not ingredient studies, to back up its health claims. And when it comes to disease-treatment claims, it would also need to be a drug approved by the FDA, which the FDA made clear in its letter Nyloxin is not:

The assertion of “FDA Registered” status in conjunction with the Nyloxin logo in the website’s footers misleadingly suggests that the Nyloxin drug products are themselves approved or endorsed by FDA in some way when this is not true…

So maybe for now stick to non-serpentine methods of medication.

Find more of our coverage on homeopathic products here.