10 Most Unethical Business Actions

#4 Matthias Rath: The Doctor

Matthias Rath, the doctor turned vitamin entrepreneur, runs the Dr. Rath Health Foundation and founded the Dr. Rath Research Institute.

In the U. K., he advertised that “90 per cent of patients receiving chemotherapy for cancer die within months of starting treatment.” He suggested that three million lives could be saved if the cancer patients stopped being treated by conventional methods. He came up with alternative “pills” to cure cancer and because of his powerful ads, his medication became popular. Before he got caught he made great wealth and fled to South Africa with an entirely new medicine which was claimed to cure AIDS.

This time his full page newspaper ad said, “The answer to the AIDS epidemic is here. Anti-retroviral drugs were poisonous, and were a conspiracy to kill patients and make money”. Tragically, Matthias Rath had a keen skill to take his ideas to the right place. Thabo Mbeki, the President of South Africa, well known as an “AIDS protester”, gave support to the claims of a small band of campaigners who state that AIDS does not exist, that it is not caused by HIV that anti-retroviral medication does more harm than good, and so on. This was when the people of his country died at the rate of one in every two minutes.

 If the South African national government had used anti-retroviral drugs for prevention and treatment around 171,000 new HIV infections and 343,000 deaths could have been prevented between 1999 and 2007.

Rath, meanwhile, profited from all this anti-science feeling with his vitamin pills. Those pills were sold very well even though they were not supported by any trusted medical research. Matthias is constantly filing legal actions against medical professionals for slander, when they say that his pills are useless and should not be seen as an alternative to tested medicines.