The Dragon´s Recipe | Translation

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[Daniel Alarcón]: This is Radio Ambulante, I’m Daniel Alarcón.

[Lulú]: It feels like a very localized, very intense pain.

[Daniel]: She is María de Lourdes Rodríguez Ramírez. Better known as Lulú, a 71-year-old Mexican woman.

[María de Lourdes Rodríguez, Lulú]: And the knee starts to widen, I suppose it becomes inflamed. Just touching it with my finger felt like I was sticking a pin in myself. I mean, that’s how intense it was, you know?

[Daniel]: But that pain, at first, when Lulú was very young, started just as a discomfort. Something unusual.

[Lulú]: I was still in university when I detected that with certain movements there was a sound, a clicking in my knee, but there was no pain. And I had it like that for a long time.

[Daniel]: It was after a car accident that this clicking became an acute and persistent discomfort.

[Lulú]: And obviously, as I got older, that pain started to gradually intensify until it became truly unbearable pain. (…) On many occasions I would get home and sit down to cry because the pain was intense.

[Daniel]: Some time later Lulú was diagnosed with osteoarthritis, a degenerative disease characterized by the wearing down of cartilage in the joints. Lulú is a biology professor at a university in Texcoco, in the State of Mexico, and for a long time, in addition to teaching classes, going up and down stairs, she had to do fieldwork and long trips frequently. But all of that became impossible: she began to reduce her physical activity and notice increasingly clearly how temperature changes or humidity made the pain worse.

For years she tried everything.

[Lulú]: I’ve tried many things, so many different things: naturopathic, brand-name medicine and all that, and chiropractors and all those kinds of things and nothing, I mean, they would take away the pain for a while and then it would come back.

[Daniel]: But in mid-2020, something appeared that finally seemed to work. That day, Carmen Vásquez, a secretary at the university, told Lulú that she understood her suffering. She too had been dealing with joint pain for several years due to rheumatoid arthritis. This is Carmen.

[Carmen Vásquez]: I couldn’t walk anymore… from the pain. I was dragging my little feet. I never wanted to go on disability because I felt that would depress me even more than I was already getting depressed having to depend on others to dress me, even to lift a pot, because it was very painful, very, very painful.

[Daniel]: But the good news Carmen had was that a few months earlier, another coworker had recommended some naturopathic pills that had garlic as their main ingredient. Her parents, over 80 years old, had pains similar to Carmen’s and were taking them.

[Carmen]: And she tells me, “What do you think has been working really well for my parents?” And well, I dared to bring her a little bottle for her to try, well, you’ll see.

[Daniel]: The little bottle was actually a white plastic jar about 10 centimeters tall. It had a blue and yellow label with a golden garlic in the center. The name, in large white letters, was very clear: Artri Ajo King. Everywhere the word “original” appeared: on the label, on the box, on the lid. That was something important, because her coworker told Carmen that there were many other pirate brands that didn’t have the same benefit.

[Carmen]: Even the little box had a special seal and also the little capsule was a different color, the pirate ones were green.

[Daniel]: And these, the Artri Ajo King ones, the ones that claimed to be the originals, were sand-colored. According to the instructions on the bottle, you should take two pills with each meal. Carmen decided to try just one first. And with that, just one, her life changed.

[Carmen]: Like after 15 minutes it started to take effect and I was like, Wow, Wow! This is great. The little pill had made me feel super powerful because I could move. Man, as soon as I took it I could go down and up the agroecology stairs that are terribly steep like that, so terrible and tiring for a person in my condition.

[Daniel]: For Carmen the pills had meant being able to move again and in just a few months recovering the life she had before rheumatoid arthritis. So when she saw Lulú with that unbearable knee pain, she didn’t think twice.

[Carmen]: And so, well, it occurs to me to tell her, You know what? Look, this helped me, you know, with my problem, maybe it could help you.

[Lulú]: She gave me a bottle and oh surprise, of all the things I had taken, of all the remedies they had recommended, medical products they recommended, that was the only one that after two days of taking it took away my pain.

[Daniel]: After having lived more than a decade with that intense pain, not feeling it was a miracle. A fast and powerful miracle.

But the happiness didn’t last long. Soon they realized that Artri Ajo King, in reality, was not what it seemed.

After the break, journalist Aleida Rueda, Lulú’s daughter, continues telling us.

We’ll be right back.

[Daniel]: We’re back on Radio Ambulante. Aleida Rueda tells us.

[Aleida Rueda]: To my mom’s surprise, Lulú, Artri Ajo King relieved her pains. It was fast, effective, practically miraculous. That’s why she and Carmen, who recommended them, kept taking the pills very diligently. My mom, one pill twice a day, and Carmen, one daily.

But along with the initial relief, they started noticing other things. This is Carmen.

[Carmen]: I started to feel many, many drastic changes in my body, starting with gaining a lot of weight. My little face started to get round, round like the moon. I started retaining a lot of fluids, which is what scared me, right?

[Aleida]: Carmen, at first, related everything to the stress triggered by the pandemic. She and her entire family got COVID. Her father died from the virus, and she had to be her family’s breadwinner. When she noticed those changes in her body, she thought they were aftereffects of grief.

[Carmen]: I attributed it to my emotional state, to everything I had lived through, to stress, all that emotional situation that surrounded me. I felt that was what was triggering in my body, plus well, the bug, right?

[Aleida]: The bug, the COVID she had had. Carmen thought it would pass with time, so she didn’t go to the doctor.

But it couldn’t be a coincidence that after four months of taking the same Ajo King pills, my mom also started experiencing something she had never seen.

[Lulú]: My legs started to swell. I already have thick legs, but this was inflammation. And I would touch them with my hand and it felt like I was caressing myself with sandpaper. It was a strange sensation. That burning sensation.

[Aleida]: My mom, unlike Carmen, did decide to go to the doctor. It was an internal medicine endocrinologist.

[Lulú]: So he examined me and he asked me, what are you taking for knee pain? And that’s when I told him it was Ajo King and he told me that product had consequences.

He told me it was likely I had lupus, that I was already diabetic, he said.

[Aleida]: How could she have diabetes, that strange swelling, and also the possibility of lupus if what she was taking were naturopathic pills? They’re supposed to be harmless. My mom had reviewed the formula on the Artri Ajo King jar.

[Lulú]: And it said it was a naturopathic product and indeed they listed…

[Aleida]: Glucosamine, garlic, collagen, turmeric, Omega 3, calcium. It also mentions chamomile. Nothing sounded strange. She didn’t understand what was happening.

I wasn’t with my mom the day she received that diagnosis, but she told me about the anguish she felt leaving that medical appointment.

[Lulú]: I was scared and bad. And I got home and I remember I threw the pills in the bathroom.

[Aleida]: When she finally got the tests done, the doctor diagnosed her with prediabetes and prescribed treatment to prevent it from advancing to diabetes. That calmed her down a bit, but even so, being prediabetic, when she had always been a healthy woman, was too overwhelming. She also couldn’t stop thinking about my grandmother, her mom, because she had also lived a good part of her life with the same unbearable knee pain.

She also had osteoarthritis and when remedies were insufficient, the doctor recommended she have surgery and get a prosthesis to have a more or less normal life. She accepted and, after the surgery, indeed the pain disappeared. But we’re talking about 2004, the prostheses were much larger and heavier than now, so after the operation my grandmother, at 75 years old, lost the ability to move.

This is a sad part of my family’s history. My grandmother couldn’t move again without help and died 6 years after the surgery. My mom always says it wasn’t from a disease, but from sadness.

[Lulú]: Well, a gradual process of general deterioration came over her because she was a very active woman and this immobility that the prosthesis gave her and the pain itself in her knee made her finally get depressed and this led to the other, right? And she passed away.

[Aleida]: My grandmother’s death not only left my mom with immense pain but also a deep fear of having surgery and getting a prosthesis that would paralyze her. That fear explains why my mom tried everything to relieve her knee pain. She wanted to delay surgery at all costs.

So when Carmen, the university secretary, came into her life with those miraculous pills, my mom thought she had finally managed to avoid the operation that had robbed my grandmother of her life.

But the doctor’s diagnosis and the fact that those pills Carmen had recommended had serious side effects, was devastating. The next day my mom ran to find her to tell her. This is Carmen again.

[Carmen]: She told me, “You know what, Carmelita?” I started feeling really bad, so I went to the doctor and they diagnosed me with diabetes. I’m telling you because you know what triggered it? The pills you recommended. Don’t tell me that.

[Aleida]: As we already know, Carmen was having very strange symptoms that she had associated with COVID and stress. But what Lulú was telling her changed everything.

[Carmen]: If she hadn’t told me that, I wouldn’t have been alerted about the little pills.

[Aleida]: Carmen started investigating on the Internet. It was August 2021, and she found that just in those days, COFEPRIS, the Federal Commission for Protection against Health Risks, had published a health alert about Artri Ajo King.

That alert, which is public, said that this product is marketed illegally and that despite being offered as —I quote— a “product for pain and to recover flexibility,” it represents a health risk.

It also said that the pills were analyzed in a COFEPRIS laboratory, and reported that Artri Ajo King had ingredients that are not natural and, moreover, don’t appear on the bottle’s formula.

[Carmen]: And how was it possible? I mean, my mind couldn’t comprehend that this, that this, that this treatment or that this supposed natural supplement contained ingredients that weren’t declared in its formula, or anywhere on the little box.

[Aleida]: Reading the health alert about Artri Ajo King, Carmen learned that the two ingredients not listed on the jar’s label are called dexamethasone and methylprednisolone. Both are corticosteroids, a type of steroid from the same family of drugs as cortisone.

Cortisone is a synthetic version of a natural hormone we produce: cortisol. It can be injected, oral, topical or inhaled. Cortisone is very useful for reducing inflammation and suppressing the immune system response, yes, but its use should be short-term and under medical supervision because its side effects are serious: diabetes, osteoporosis, weight gain, hypertension, immune system suppression and eye problems, among others.

[Aleida]: Hello, how are you? I’m here to see Dr. Luis del Carpio.

[Receptionist]: Ah, ok. What’s your name?

[Aleida]: Aleida.

The doctor who treated my mom, the same one who gave her the diabetes diagnosis, recommended I speak with a colleague of his, from Veracruz.

[Luis del Carpio]: I’m Luis del Carpio Orante. I’m an internist and I work for the Mexican Social Security Institute and I’m also affiliated with the College of Internal Medicine of the state of Veracruz.

[Aleida]: Luis has gained visibility in the medical community for being practically an activist against Artri Ajo King. He participates in conferences and congresses, writes articles and posts on social media about the topic. He was one of the first in Mexico to report and disseminate cases of health damage from consuming these pills, something he started noticing in 2018, when he observed a pattern in several of his patients.

[Luis]: Patients who caught my attention who came for chronic pain but already had other situations, they were swelling, they had skin problems, stretch marks.

[Aleida]: They also arrived with diabetes. In some cases, with the disease very advanced…

[Luis]: And that despite insulin and all that it wasn’t controlled, right? And well, investigating, seeing what else they were doing, well I came to the fact that they were consuming herbal remedies.

[Aleida]: Pills like the ones my mom and Carmen took. Some with the same name, Artri Ajo King, but also other brands like Ajo Rey, Artri King, Ortiga Ajo King, AK Forte. When Luis shared his concerns with other internal medicine doctors in Veracruz, he realized he wasn’t the only one seeing that pattern.

[Luis]: And I tell you, in the internists’ group I would comment on the cases, well yeah, I just saw three patients too, right? I just saw another five patients. And if we tried to keep a record of how many we saw, for example, in a month we could see I don’t know, in the whole group, between 40 to 50 patients monthly, imagine that.

[Aleida]: And since during the pandemic many rheumatologists—who are the ones who handle these chronic pains—stopped seeing patients, the cases of people taking these pills increased…

[Luis]: And surely the population well started looking for other options, right? And it’s that these products have spread like oral tradition, right? My aunt recommended it to me, my cousin, my grandmother takes it, my friend, right?

[Aleida]: Everyone recommends them and everyone finds them easily in any naturopathic store. Plus, they leave many profits. By 2024, the Mexican market for natural wellness products (which includes everything from dietary supplements to therapeutic products) was valued at 8 billion dollars, and is expected to reach 14 billion dollars by 2032.

The National Association of the Dietary Supplement Industry (ANAISA) reported in 2020 that more than 15 million Mexicans consumed these products. There are no official figures, but it’s estimated that there could be many more now.

Just in the Port of Veracruz, Luis has found about 40 stores that sell products like Artri Ajo King without any restriction.

[Luis]: So, it’s like they are sold indiscriminately without a medical prescription. You can arrive and say, I have something for pain, right? Well, Artri King, right?

[Aleida]: So I went to verify it.

[Daniel]: A break and we’ll be back.

[Daniel]: We’re back. I leave you with Aleida.

[Aleida]: Taking advantage of being in the Port of Veracruz, I went downtown and visited some of those stores. In all of them I entered with the same question…

Hello, how are you? What do you have for arthritis pain?

[Aleida]: They brought out several similar bottles… and started reciting all the ailments the different pills are for…

[Vendor]: Arthritis, joints, bone pain, ligaments. For reducing inflammation. But which one works better, I mean, any of them, any of them. That’s the one I sell the most, Ajo King. Ah, that Ajo King one. It has collagen on top of that and calcifies, the others don’t have calcium.

It’s not harmful. It doesn’t affect your stomach, kidney, or liver. Like medicine. Uh-huh. This you start seeing from the second or third day.

[Aleida]: All the vendors I spoke with said wonderful things about Artri Ajo King or some of its variants. This one in particular, told me everyone can take it…

[Store]: Well, there are no ages here, eh. I mean, it’s not a requirement, I mean, anyone can take it. Children? Children? Children? Children too need it, there’s a decalcified child whose bones hurt a lot, they need it too.

[Aleida]: There was another vendor who even told me it was good for people with diabetes…

[Store]: I have this one that’s especially for muscular, muscular, helps reduce inflammation and it’s suitable if the person is diabetic. It doesn’t raise their glucose or do them any harm.

[Aleida]: Artri Ajo King is one of the best-selling products in these stores, but it’s not the only one. The shelves were full of very similar brands: Artribion, Ortiga Ajo Rey, AKA Forte… the vendors themselves told me they’re practically the same thing.

[Store]: Just one or two ingredients, that’s what varies. You get me? So, for example, those three are very similar because they’re the same thing, the same brand, the same laboratory. They just add one more ingredient. Okay. In this case it’s cannabis. Here nettle, here vitamin B.

[Aleida]: At another store they told me there are new products for joint pain.

[Store]: It’s like products come into fashion. Right now it’s these two.

[Aleida]: So, they became fashionable for some reason?

[Store]: Well, because of turmeric. Most products have turmeric.

[Aleida]: The products they showed me are black pepper plus turmeric and compound turmeric. Supposedly turmeric has antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and analgesic effects, but, just like with Artri Ajo King, the bottles they show me are suspicious. Both are from the Life Natural 2000 brand, they also don’t have health registrations, and also have phrases like “product made in Mexico” and “100% natural.”

The magic words they use to convince you are always the same: natural and naturopathic. The discourse that seems to prevail is that medicines that aren’t natural become a danger because “they’re chemicals.” On the other hand, if it’s natural, it can’t hurt you. This argument ignores that everything in nature is full of chemical substances, many of which have been taken as the basis for traditional medicine drugs.

A few months ago, Dr. Luis del Carpio analyzed products from several of these brands to detect if they contain corticosteroids. He dissolved each product in water, and used a method very similar to COVID or pregnancy tests. Of the 19 samples he analyzed, 17 tested positive for corticosteroids: Artri King, Artri Ajo King, AK Forte, Reuma King, Ortiga Ajo Rey, Artribion, Contra Reumas, Osteo sin Max, Reumafon and Flexibion, among others.

[Luis]: This industry is chameleon-like, because look, ArtriKing now changed its name to Reuma King which is practically the same thing. They just change the presentation.

[Aleida]: COFEPRIS —remember those are the initials for the Federal Commission for Protection against Health Risks— isn’t the only one that has published health alerts about these products. The FDA, the United States Drug Regulatory Agency, also issued a public notification in April 2022 alerting about Artri Ajo King, since it’s also been sold in that country for some time.

According to the FDA analyses, in addition to dexamethasone, Artri Ajo King and its variants with Nettle have diclofenac. The indiscriminate consumption of this substance, the FDA says —and I quote— “can increase the risk of suffering cardiovascular effects, such as heart attacks and strokes, as well as gastrointestinal damage, including bleeding, ulcerations and fatal perforations of the stomach and intestines.”

But they always look for ways to evade the alerts. For example Ortiga Más Ajo Rey…

[Luis]: On platforms. If you look up Artri King it has the FDA lock, right. But if you look at Reuma King it doesn’t have a lock. And for example, nettle also has an FDA lock. Now it changed to nettle and garlic. Just like that. And it’s being sold on the market.

[Aleida]: And while health agencies move at a slow pace, the products sell like hotcakes. I asked one of the vendors how sales were going with the ones that have Turmeric, which are the fashionable ones.

[Store 3]: In one day maybe like 100, 110, I mean…

[Aleida]: 110 of these?

[Store]: … I’m telling you that’s the one we sell the most of, people start recommending it, and right now the one in style is this one.

[Aleida]: I asked about Artri King, which isn’t so fashionable anymore.

[Store 3]: Of that one very little now, I mean, 50…

[Aleida]: 50 a day!, that’s still a lot anyway.

[Store]: Yes.

[Aleida]: I bought a bottle of Artri Ajo King for 140 pesos, about 7 dollars. One side of the box is in Spanish, the other in English. And in large letters it says: This is not a medication. I read its ingredients, the same ones my mom read: glucosamine, garlic, collagen, turmeric, Omega 3, calcium. It also mentions chamomile. About how to use it, it says you should take 2 tablets three times a day.

And despite the fact that both COFEPRIS and the FDA, or even doctors like Luis del Carpio, know that these products contain corticosteroids, nobody knows exactly how much, since determining the amount requires more sophisticated technology. And if the recommendation is to take 6 pills a day, it can be assumed that the corticosteroid doses are not low. Something that can be dangerous.

[Luis]: That generates a lot of stress on each organ. And that stress makes the organs, so to speak, accelerate in their functioning and fall into imbalance or failure of that organ, right? Leading us to kidney failure, liver failure, heart failure, right?

[Aleida]: Most of the patients Luis treated started developing symptoms of a disease known as Cushing’s Syndrome, a hormonal disorder that occurs when the body is exposed to elevated levels of cortisol for a prolonged period.

It’s relatively simple to identify because patients’ legs, feet and, especially, face start to swell. Purple stretch marks also appear, muscle weakness, blood pressure rises, there are changes in the skin and mood and, as we already mentioned, it can cause diabetes or make it worse.

[Luis]: What happens is that since it’s an excess of hormones, it blocks all the other hormones, it blocks thyroid hormones, it blocks the pancreas from producing insulin. So since it’s that exaggerated excess of hormone in the body it goes blocking all the other axes.

[Aleida]: My mom didn’t develop Cushing’s syndrome. Fortunately. But the two diagnostic possibilities, both lupus and diabetes, were enough for her to know perfectly well what she had to do.

[Lulú]: So, that’s when I said, “I can’t be taking products I don’t know what they are. Either they do nothing to me and finally my liver, my kidneys are going to get damaged and the pain and the knee problem is still there.” So, that’s when I made the decision to have the operation.

[Aleida]: She had surgery on her left knee in early 2023 and her recovery was incredibly fast: in less than a month she was dancing. She improved her diet, goes out walking every day. And after some studies, her blood glucose levels returned to normal.

[Lulú]: I suppose in this country there are millions of people with knee problems and many people take a long time to make the decision like I took, but it’s wonderful. Orthopedists already know what needs to be done. That’s why now with great confidence I say: I think this year I’ll have surgery on my right knee.

[Aleida]: Carmen took a little longer to decide to stop taking the pills. She had been taking them for more than seven months and refused to return to a life with pain, despite the damage to her body already being visible. It was only when her health worsened that, finally, she decided to go to the doctor.

[Carmen]: I tell him: “And this isn’t normal.” No, at that moment I took off my mask like this, look, I mean, my face had never been like this, my legs, I mean, I can’t stand this situation anymore, I can’t stand it anymore, because I had also developed thyroid problems, my cholesterol levels had been altered, triglycerides, things that were already taking me almost to a heart attack.

[Aleida]: After doing several tests the verdict was clear:

[Carmen]: If we don’t lower these levels, Carmen, you don’t know, you’re not even going to make it. So, you need to start reducing, “You can’t” he says. “Because if this contains cortisone you can’t just stop it cold turkey either.”

[Aleida]: The recommendation was that she should lower the dose over a period of six months but Carmen did it in just one. From one pill, she went to half and then to zero. She accelerated the process because of the desperation she had.

[Carmen]: I didn’t want to, I didn’t want to anymore. I mean, I said: “If this is what’s damaging me, whatever it takes, but no. I’m going to have to endure it.” For me the process was terrible, super painful. It came back 200 thousand percent.

[Aleida]: Carmen had to learn to live with the pain, and get rid of the miracle product, eliminate it from her body and her life.

In the midst of everything, my mom’s and Carmen’s cases were relatively positive… at least both stopped taking the pills in time. Before the consequences were irreversible. Both have returned to having a more or less normal life.

But not everyone has the same luck.

[Daniel]: A break and we’ll be back

[Daniel]: We’re back. I leave you with Aleida.

[Aleida]: Dr. Luis del Carpio referred me to her:

[Patricia María Vela]: My name is Patricia María Vela Aguilar, I currently reside in the city and port of Veracruz, in the state of Veracruz.

[Aleida]: Del Carpio treated Patricia’s father, Mario Benito Vela, 65 years old, for several months.

He lived alone and had been experiencing chronic back and knee pain for a long time. This added to his insomnia and anxiety. That’s why, in his desperation, he started taking AK Forte, a relative of Artri King. He never told her he was taking it but it was very quick that Patricia started seeing him increasingly swollen: his hands, arms, legs.

She insisted they go to the doctor but her father refused. Finally she convinced him and they went together to see Dr. del Carpio.

[Patricia]: They ask the key question, are you taking any medication? My dad says: “Yes, I’m taking some naturopathic products.”

[Aleida]: That’s when she found out there were several…

[Patricia]: He was taking something to control his nerves. One called zero stress, and later he indicates he was taking another compound of turmeric with garlic that says on its bottle that I still have, it says “powerful anti-inflammatory” and supposedly has shark cartilage and is reinforced with nettle. Supposedly. Another one has the initials AK forte and says Nettle and Omega three.

[Aleida]: That supposedly for joints. In total, he was taking 9 pills a day. And he had been doing it for quite some time.

[Luis]: And he was taking that for 2 years… 2 continuous years. A very long time, right? And if we do the math maybe for the industry well it went very well, right? Because the patient would buy it, buy it, buy it, try to quit and come back with the pain, so he’d say, “I’ll take it again,” right?

[Aleida]: From the moment he saw him, Dr. Del Carpio knew that consuming all those pills with corticosteroids were causing damage to several of his organs. Finally, a trauma doctor, a specialist in hip and back, told Patricia that her father had an infection in his spinal column caused by a bacteria, probably due to his already very deteriorated immune system. When she took him to the hospital, they told her they had to give him antibiotics for four weeks, but…

[Patricia]: Well unfortunately my dad didn’t make it to four weeks and just as he was starting the third week my dad passed away, he was admitted to IMSS on March 9 and died on March 27.

[Aleida]: Paty knows many people in her circle who are taking these pills. She herself, before her father got sick, also ended up involved in the business of these supplements. She started taking them for knee pain, they were called FTX.

[Patricia]: I even became a member, because that’s the hook. They invite you to be a member because they don’t make money from the product they sell, but from the memberships people acquire and it’s an impressive chain. They have distribution even in the United States.

[Aleida]: And through a recurring payment, members receive products at home, access exclusive discounts, accumulate points and other benefits. Patricia only took these pills for a month and a half and canceled her membership after she suspected the supplement wasn’t good for her health. But that’s not the case for many other people. That’s why she tries to talk with everyone she can, tells them her father’s story and has even shared photos of the supplements he was taking…

[Patricia]: To alert them, to tell them Ajo Rey doesn’t work either, none of this, all of this is garbage and there are people who don’t see it that way because it’s cheaper to buy a pill, a naturopathic supplement that costs I don’t know, less than going to a specialist who prescribes medication from some laboratory line that are well, more expensive.

[Aleida]: For those who aren’t Mexican, it should be clarified that the public health system usually provides a baseline of medications for free. But if they don’t have them, whether because there’s a shortage or because they simply don’t cover them, people have to get them at private pharmacies. An example are the analgesic patches Patricia’s father needed that cost more than 100 dollars for a pack of four. It’s easy to understand why so many people resort to cheaper and more accessible products like naturopathic ones.

[Patricia]: Well, in the institutions you don’t find medications so better I’ll go to these products and I tell the girl who’s selling, “Hey, I’ve been feeling like this, what product do you have that can help me.” And well they’re trained to tell you such and such products, but what they don’t tell you is what this product contains and you don’t ask either or take the trouble to go to a doctor and say, “Can this product do me good?” I mean, there’s a situation of shared responsibility between ourselves that we should take care of and the other part which is the health authority to alert people about what’s happening in our country.

[Aleida]: To that we must add the increasingly sophisticated strategies that the companies selling these products use to attract more customers, which in many cases function as a pyramid scheme.

Faced with this impressive naturopathic products market, there doesn’t seem to be a way out for many of the people who get sick from consuming them. It’s also not clear who can be reported. Who is responsible for the death of Patricia’s father?

[Patricia]: I don’t have the legal guidance on how I can file a complaint and against whom when the bottles say this medication is the responsibility of whoever uses and recommends it.

[Aleida]: The Artri Ajo King bottle I have says the same thing: the responsibility is the consumer’s. But who’s responsible for deliberately hiding ingredients in these pills?

For this story I reviewed several online shopping sites and on places like Mercado Libre or social media they’re sold without any prescription. You can order one bottle or several, and they arrive at your door in less than 24 hours. I bought several of these products and saw that addresses of supposed laboratories appear on all of them. But you just need to put them in Google maps to see that some of those addresses don’t exist, or they take you to vacant lots, unmarked entryways or small businesses not very related to naturopathic products.

I looked again at the Artri Ajo King box I had bought in Veracruz. The name of the laboratory that manufactures it is Dragon King and it has an exact address: Carretera Amayuc Jonacatepec No. 89 Amayuca, Morelos.

So I went there.

Jonacatepec is about 3 hours from Mexico City. And despite arriving at the point the GPS marked, there was no laboratory; only some businesses, clothing stores, paint stores, and livestock feed.

After asking around a bit, I finally found it. The laboratory exists, but it has a very different appearance from the classic image of a serious laboratory with basic hygiene standards. The first thing you see is a sign that’s actually a wrinkled tarp tied to the wall with some ropes. In large letters appears the name: Dragon King where the letter G is the drawing of a dragon. It’s in a rustic location that has no doorbell, no guards. It has no front wall, just some bars covered by a black mesh.

[Dragon]: Hello? Hello? Good afternoon.

[Aleida]: Despite my shouts nobody came out. Through the bars I only managed to see a kind of gatehouse, a small cleaning room and a large fan as if to filter the air. Noise could be heard.

Like a machine inside a plant that activates for a few minutes.

I was there for three hours and nobody appeared.

[Aleida]: Before leaving I managed to see that there was a sign with the name of the person who registered the laboratory: Emmanuel Zúñiga. Indeed. According to the Ministry of Economy, the Dragon King Laboratory was registered as a company in 2021 under Zúñiga’s name, some years after Artri Ajo King started being sold.

Searching online, I learned that he is the president of the National Federation of the Herbal Industry, a non-profit civil organization whose mission is to promote, protect and formalize traditional medicinal plants. The Federation, in theory, supposedly also promotes —and I quote— “its regulation, good manufacturing practices, labeling and its integration into the national health system.” In addition to being the federation’s spokesperson and representative before authorities like COFEPRIS, Zúñiga is also the negotiator of agreements to regularize the herbal industry. He’s somewhat famous, offers courses on herbalism and traditional medicine and has appeared on some radio and television programs.

[Emmanuel Zúñiga]: The products of the National Federation of the Herbal Industry well… We also have the responsibility to guarantee products and services that are effective, that are quality and that comply with certain regulations.

[Aleida]: For months I tried to contact Emmanuel, without success. But a few days ago I managed to reach him on his personal phone. In a voice message he told me that it was other producers of “pirate” pills who were causing the damage, not his. 

[Emmanuel]: We, Laboratorio Dragon King, have the registered trademark, we have everything in order. The problem is that there are pirates who are doing it. We have already filed complaints, but the prosecutor’s office has done nothing. 

[Aleida]: I asked him to send me copies of those complaints and requested an interview, but as of the closing of this episode, I had not received a response.

What I did find is that there are 21 products registered in his name, all from the King family: Artri King, Artri Ajo King, Artri King Ortiga más Ajo, Ortiga Ajo Rey, Árnica más ajo rey. But also others with more exotic names like Chupapanza and Mariguanol Extra. Zúñiga even has other companies for plastic containers and herbalism.

It’s hard to know how many people are involved in the supplements industry. Zúñiga seems to be one of the key players, but there are dozens of other brands, other deceptive products and other laboratories that function in a similar way. Given the number of products, distributors and vendors it seems to be an immense and unstoppable market because despite health alerts, these products are produced and sold wholesale and without restrictions. For Patricia it’s clear that this business is a huge public health problem and that the government should intervene. The fact that there are no massive campaigns to alert about these dangers makes Patricia suspect…

[Patricia]: This makes me understand there’s a network of complicity that surely exists because it’s not possible that these establishments continue proliferating selling these herbal naturopathic products that are killing many people. I really feel a lot of anger, a lot of rage, a lot of helplessness that nothing is being done about it and that many people keep consuming them not knowing they’re affecting the population, Aleida.

[Aleida]: For Carmen, talking about all this continues to be very difficult.

[Carmen]: I’m a survivor really, I can’t talk about that. A survivor of a situation that I’m happy to spread the word about because I don’t want anyone else to go through what I went through. That they don’t trust again, right? Because many people suggest it to you and you say, “Well yes, if it’s something natural, let’s go.” You trust that it’s natural and it’s not like that.

[Aleida]: Despite several attempts, neither COFEPRIS nor the Ministry of Health gave me an interview to find out what they were doing to combat the sale of these products. And meanwhile, sales of Artri Ajo King and similar products continue growing…

[Daniel]: An initial version of this story was published on the podcast Pan Pa’l Susto, where Aleida participates. You can listen to it on your favorite podcast platform.

Aleida Rueda is a science journalist and lives in Mexico City. This story was edited by Camila Segura and Luis Fernando Vargas. Bruno Scelza did the fact-checking. Sound design is by Andrés Azpiri, with music by Andrés, Rémy Lozano and Ana Tuirán.

The rest of the Radio Ambulante team includes Paola Alean, Adriana Bernal, Aneris Casassus, Diego Corzo, Emilia Erbetta, Camilo Jiménez Santofimio, Germán Montoya, Samantha Proaño, Natalia Ramírez, Lina Rincón, David Trujillo, and Elsa Liliana Ulloa.

Carolina Guerrero is the CEO.

Radio Ambulante is a podcast from Radio Ambulante Estudios, it’s produced and mixed in Hindenburg PRO.

If you liked this episode and want us to keep doing independent journalism about Latin America, support us through Deambulantes, our membership program. Visit radioambulante.org/donar and help us continue narrating the region.

Radio Ambulante tells the stories of Latin America. I’m Daniel Alarcón. Thanks for listening.