One of the issues with fundraising sites like IndieGogo and Kickstarter is that there's a lack of adequate oversight to ensure that the products being offered are actually plausible. Sometimes things end up on my radar that look too good to be true, and at other times they're just plain ridiculous.

Respen-A, a homeopathic treatment for autism, is currently fundraising (opens new window) to start allowing the manufacturer to sell the product over the counter in pharmacies. Because the product is homeopathic - it's a small pill you stick to your skin - there's no approval needed to be able to sell it. However, the makers are trying to raise money in advance to pay for manufacturing of their sticky disc.

Of course, the scientific community have been comfortable in recent years saying that homeopathy doesn't work. Homeopathic products are diluted to the point of having no molecules of the original substance left, which makes them implausible. In addition to this, years of testing has shown that these products don't work.

Parents of autistic kids do not need people selling them quack cures, but unfortunately they seem to be popular targets of shysters selling nonsense. Especially for those parents who think that science (in the form of vaccines) has already injured their children in causing their autism, trust in science will be pretty low and often trust in alternative medicine sellers will be high. This makes these parents particularly susceptible to products like Respen-A, which make big claims but have very little evidence to back them up.

Respen-A has been around for a while now (opens new window), and it's sad to see it's not going away.