Get your TIVOs ready. Prepare for ads like those for HEADON (“Apply directly to the forehead, HEADON!”). A marketer in New Albany, NY has come up with a nasal spray to prevent prostate cancer. What’s in the spray? Hot pepper. He must be kidding, right?

Last year researchers at Cedars Sinai Medical Center and UCLA reported that hot pepper causes prostate cancer cells to kill themselves off. In mice fed chow laced with hot pepper, 80% of implanted prostate cancer cells self-destructed by the natural process of apoptosis. But it took quite a helping of hot pepper to bring this about. The researcheres estimated that

the dose of pepper extract fed orally to the mice was equivalent to giving 400 milligrams of capsaicin three times a week to a 200 pound man, roughly equivalent to between three and eight fresh habañera peppers – depending on the pepper’s capsaicin content. See: Hot Pepper Ingredient Kills Prostate Cancer Cells

Wayne Perry, president of SiCap Industries in New Albany, wants to persuade American men that they can prevent prostate cancer by spraying his proprietary, over the counter pepper spray up their noses. If you think he means the equivalent of the amount of pepper that worked in mice — and if you imagine a spray like MACE — you’re not reading the fine print.

Perry says he “originally discovered the headache stopping power of hot peppers quite by accident after appearing on the Oprah Winfrey Show. At that time, Perry taught self defense. His gimmick was to be sprayed with ‘real’ self defense pepper spray for live television cameras. “After his Oprah appearance, Perry was inundated with requests by tv shows to get sprayed on camera.”

Under the name of “Sinus Buster” Perry sells hot pepper nasal spray as “a major breakthrough in sinus, allergy and headache relief. “Perry is marketing this nasal spray also for “Katrina Cough.” Now comes an even more serious breakthrough. Perry writes in a press release:

The most important aspect of this new nasal spray may be its potential for preventing prostate cancer. A recent study in Cancer Research showed that capsaicin directly killed prostate cancer cells, and curbed tumor growth. The research team found that capsaicin blocks certain chemicals …. Although the capsaicin was injected directly into live cells in Petri dishes and mice, SiCap’s research team theorizes that a nasal spray could far more effective than intravenous injection.

Now why would SciCap’s team theorize this? Have they tested the spray on cancer cells in a test tube, in mice, or in men? Perry’s publicist hasn’t even read the original studies — capsaicin was not injected, it was fed.

As far as can be seen from the website marketing this product, it is supposed to be a homeopathic remedy like the loudly advertised headache remedy. By definition, homeopathic
remedies deliver decimal parts herbal or mineral ingredient per millions of parts of water, wax, or other carrier. According to Wikipedia,

Chemical analysis has shown that [HEADON] consists almost entirely of wax. The two listed active ingredients, white bryony (a type of vine) and potassium dichromate, are diluted to .000001 PPM and 1 PPM respectively. This amount of dilution is so great that the product is arguably a placebo. However, the package does list menthol as an inactive ingredient; menthol is one of the active ingredients of Vicks VapoRub.”

To go from an over the counter remedy for sinus congestion to selling a remedy for prostate cancer is a stretch. Perry is remarkably cheery about this: He says: “My prostate feels great, and I don’t get up to pee at night anymore, but best of all my sexual performance is better than when I was in my twenties.”