ARMRA’s “Science” Is OA Ads
83% of articles cited in their main “research” areas were published pay-to-play
ARMRA is a bovine colostrum powder which claims to be “Your Revival of Health.” It was, according to the online history they provide, “the brainchild of Sarah Rahal, MD, a pediatric neurologist with expertise in environmental health and quantum biology.”
The company that owns ARMRA is Rahal Biosciences, Inc., a Delaware corporation run out of Bonita Springs, FL. It was founded in 2019 via a filing in Delaware, established in Florida in 2023.
Rahal describes herself as “double-board certified,” with the boards being the United Council for Neurologic Subspecialties (UCNS) and the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology (ABPN). She is not a Board-certified pediatrician, from what I can tell.
Like many of the MDs leveraging their degrees to peddle nutraceuticals and alternative treatments, Rahal dropped out of medicine early in her career with a heart-wrenching (she thinks) story. Casey Means is another of her ilk.
- In case you clocked the phrase “quantum biology,” it is politely described as a speculative field often aligned with pseudoscientific claims.
Rahal has been profiled on Goop, among other places. This picture greets you when you arrive at the ARMRA site:
Jennifer Aniston and Dua Lipa have been wrangled as influencers to promote ARMRA. In the non-celebrity world, the company has accumulated a rather long list of complaints with the Better Business Bureau.
More importantly, our pay-to-play OA publishing model and infrastructure — including PubMed and PubMed Central (PMC) — has been used to provide a roster of papers that gives their product claims the semblance of scientific validation while spreading them widely.
- Your tax dollars at work . . .
Of the 46 scientific articles cited in the five main zones of ARMRA’s listed “research,” 38 were published OA, mostly in Frontiers and MDPI journals.