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Home >Comments and Articles > Noel Batten
I love the smell of miracle cures in the morning (29/8/2009)
Noel Batten sells eBooks which purport to offer cures for some diseases, particularly Parkinson's Disease and Multiple Sclerosis. He was brought to my attention in the same week that by coincidence the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission had managed to shut down what appears to be an identical scam. To clear up any confusion, I emailed Mr Batten to see if I could get any further information.
Dear Mr Batten,
I notice on your web site that you sell eBooks with cures for Parkinson's Disease and Multiple Sclerosis. I wonder if the recent successful action by the ACCC against two publishers of eBooks offering miracle cures might have any application to your activities. In case you haven't seen it, the media release from the ACCC says:
International cooperation closes internet health cure scam
International cooperation between Australian and American agencies has shut down an internet medical eBook scam.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has obtained final orders, by consent, in the Federal Court of Australia against two individuals, Leanne Rita Vassallo and Aaron David Smith of Cecil Hills, New South Wales, for false, misleading and deceptive conduct in relation to a health cure scam.
The scam was brought to the ACCC's attention by the Washington State Attorney General's Department and our investigation was carried out in conjunction with them. They have also filed their own proceedings against Ms Vassallo and Mr Smith in the King County Court, Washington State, US.
The ACCC has also been working with the NSW Police.
The ACCC's court action alleged that over two years Ms Vassallo and Mr Smith operated a large number of websites selling eBooks containing claimed cures for a wide range of health conditions including acne, asthma, multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia, menopause and prostate cancer.
The court was satisfied that Ms Vassallo and Mr Smith sold the eBooks to more than 60,000 consumers internationally.
The websites were similar as each was dedicated to a particular medical condition. They featured a person who had supposedly suffered from the condition and had purportedly discovered an effective home remedy. Across a number of different websites the photograph of the author was the same, but with different names. The websites also contained testimonials from happy users of the eBooks. The testimonials were from the same people across numerous different websites. The ACCC's expert evidence was to the effect that the treatments would not have any therapeutic benefits for, or medical efficacy in the treatment of the health conditions.
On 30 July 2009 before Justice Moore, the ACCC obtained interlocutory injunctions, by consent, restraining Ms Vassallo and Mr Smith from engaging in the conduct on any website pending final hearing. The injunctions also required the respondents to take down the websites.
At the final hearing on Thursday 20 August 2009, Justice Graham, in an ex tempore judgment, found that Ms Vassallo and Mr Smith had engaged in false, misleading and deceptive conduct.
He described them as "purveyors of quack medical advice and of quack medicine."
He reached the conclusion that the testimonials were plainly contrived. He noted that the evidence showed that the respondents had received more than $US 1 million from the sale of the eBooks.
Justice Graham also made injunctions on a final basis preventing the respondents from making these or similar representations in the future. The respondents were also ordered to pay the ACCC's costs.
AACCC chairman Graeme Samuel said: "This is a warning to all internet scammers. It is becoming more and more common for agencies such as the ACCC to work with international agencies to bring about the demise of international scams like this."
Release # NR 205/09
Issued: 25th August 2009
I don't know whether the ACCC is aware of your activities, but they are probably the best people to decide whether the Vassallo and Smith ruling applies to you. In order to speedily resolve any doubt I have contacted the ACCC with the following message:
I refer to the ACCC media release # NR 205/09 "International cooperation closes internet health cure scam".
Noel Batten appears to be offering the same sort of eBooks as did Vassallo and Smith. In particular, he has two web sites offering books that claim to contain cures for Parkinson's Disease and Multiple Sclerosis.
http://www.parkinsonsdiseasecure.com – Parkinsons Disease Cure – eBook – The Greatest Medical Blunder
http://www.ms-cure.com – Multiple Sclerosis Cure – eBook – The greatest medical mistake
As both the page titles and the domain names contain the word "cure" it would be hard for Mr Batten to make a credible case that he was not offering cures for these conditions. Although neither domain name has a ".au" and Mr Batten seems to spend a lot of time overseas, both sites display Australian telephone numbers.
The claims of cures, the promulgation of these "cures" through eBooks and the reliance on unsubstantiated anecdotes make it apparent that Mr Batten is doing what Vassallo and Smith were doing and I encourage the ACCC to take the same action against him as was taken against them.
Thank you
I look forward to receiving your comments about this matter. As is my usual policy, this email and any responses will be published on my web site at www.ratbags.com/rsoles
Thank you.
Mr Batten was not pleased and tried to lie his way out of it. I was not impressed. Read his email and my reply here.
Noel is not happy (12/9/2009)
A couple of weeks back I sent a Kind and Gentle letter to Noel Batten asking for his comment on successful legal action against a company doing just what he does. Here is round two.
Dear Mr Bowditch,
My eBooks do not offer a cure, and in fact they are very clear in explaining that. I have outlined both on my websites and in my eBooks, that the treatment I offer, requires the patient to make changes to lifestyle and must do exercises and several other things to experience "IMPROVEMENT".
If you would take the time to read my websites "WITHOUT YOUR BIAS ATTITUDE" you would see that I do not offer a cure.
No, you offer "remission". Is that remission permanent or temporary. If it is temporary then it is part of the normal fluctuation of both Parkinson's and MS and you are therefore offering nothing that can't be achieved by any patient following their doctor's advice. If you say the remission is permanent then I can't see how you can claim that you are not offering a cure.
As for my URL's, I replaced the URL's that have the word "cure" in them, some months ago, but for some reason they are still floating around because the registration is still current. Due to your email to me, I will ask my webmaster to search them out and finalise them. I have been using the URL's "parkinsons-success.com" and ms-success.com for some time now. Try them and you will see for yourself.
I did try the new URLs and yes, they work. The content is still the same, however, including the word "cure" in the page titles.
One thing I do use my websites for however, is to speak out about the wrongs of the medical profession and it is idiots like you who contribute to stopping people like me from speaking out, which is why medical leaders can do almost anything they want to us, even if we don't agree.
Nobody is trying to silence you, just get you to stop claiming that you can cure, sorry, offer permanent remission from chronic, incurable diseases.
They are presently trying to make it law that any individual is not allowed to refuse medical advice. This means that if they decide the best treatment for you, to minimise a health problem, is to take a drug that has drastic side-effects, or have an organ removed that can render part of you, useless, you won't be able to say "NO!"
Please provide evidence from some verifiable government or parliamentary source that there is any intention in Australia or elsewhere to remove from people the right to ignore medical advice. I have been told this before but nobody has been able to provide any details. Please note that web sites such as those run by Joseph Mercola or Jeff Rense will not be accepted as reliable references in this matter.
Is this what you would want, if you develop an autoimmune disease, or on another note, is this what you would want if a loved one developed an autoimmune disease and you did not agree to them doing to your loved one, what they wanted to do???
There has been a way to overcome cancer for many years and it was established by Dr Max Gerson, a medical doctor, but they ruined him because they didn't want the public following his ideals because his ideals bypassed pharmaceutical drugs.
That would be the Max Gerson who died fifty years ago. The Max Gerson whose descendants have to hide in Tijuana with the rest of the quacks pretending to cure cancer. The Max Gerson who would have won the Nobel Prize if a tenth of what he said was true. The Max Gerson who was so suppressed that he was invited to testify before a US Senate committee to present his findings about the cure for all cancer. The Max Gerson who was the model for the cancer "curers" stealing the hopes and money of desperate people in places where they can hide from the law. That Max Gerson.
A journalist by the name of Ed McCabe, figured out how to overcome HIV by using ozone therapy and when he began teaching medical doctors how to use his method to help HIV patients, they jailed him and his method is becoming burried. He quotes a medical journal that explains how Ozone was documented by medical scientists as being able to overcome HIV, but the medical profession will not train doctors to use this approach, because it by-passes pharmaceutical drugs. If you were diagnosed with HIV, wouldn't you want the treatment that actually works, rather than the drugs that don't work, but add side-effects to the problems you would already be having???
If I were to be diagnosed with HIV I would want to use the drugs that have been shown to work, not treatments that have not been shown to work. As there are about twenty papers listed in PubMed that address the action of ozone on HIV you might like to explain how doctors are prevented from performing or reading about this groundbreaking research (which has been going on for almost twenty years). Real scientists have tested the action of ozone on the HIV virus. Real scientists then went on to look for something which was of some use instead of wasting their time and the lives of people with HIV.
Stop and think this out a little before you give them so much power that you no longer have any say whatsoever. Stop and think things out a little, before you destroy the honest Natural Health Practitioners in your uneducated attack.
I am an honest truthful qualified practitioner who is an ex-patient who they nearly ruined with pharmaceutical drugs and I have video proof that what I offer, actually works. It is not a cure, and only a percentage experience really good improvement, but it does help patients reduce their suffering. On several occasions, it has helped some patients achieve remission.
Is that remission permanent?
Isn't this worth investigating, instead of destroying?
I treat some patients free of charge because they have no funds. Do you want me to stop treating them when it helps them to reduce or overcome their suffering???
As long as you aren't offering a cure or permanent remission then I don't care what you do or how much you charge for it, unless you are wanting them to pay for something that they can get for free, of course, such as lifestyle advice which is freely available from support organisations.
Think, man, think, just a little. Not all Natural Health Practitioners are crooks or ratbags.
No, some are deluded. Some are so arrogant that they believe that they know more than the thousands of scientists working to find answers to chronic disease conditions. Some are paranoid and live in fear of some great medical conspiracy to keep everyone sick and doctors and pharmaceutical companies rich.
Kind regards and God bless,
Noel N Batten
Qualified Natural Therapist
Autoimmune Specialist and
Christian Motivational Consultant
Mr Batten also sent me a nice message:
 | A personal message from Noel, to all the people he communicates with:- Be even kinder than you would normally be, and blossom fully towards "everybody", for every person you meet, is fighting some kind of battle, and very often, they won't let on. Love generously, Care deeply, Speak kindly, "even during your most stressful times"....... For life isn't about seeing the storm and waiting for it to pass... It is about being refreshed, and learning to dance in the rain. |
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