(from Danny Robbins of The Ft. Worth Star-Telegram)
Even after five years, Loretta Lewis vividly recalls the day she visited the home of her daughter, Angel Montgomery, to hear a talk by Max Brache, a sales associate for Mannatech Inc.
Much of Brache's presentation was focused on Montgomery, who only months earlier had been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer.
And, in Lewis' view, much of it was frightening, making the case that her daughter could conquer her illness by stopping her chemotherapy and taking Mannatech's dietary supplements instead.
"The thing that still galls me is how you can look somebody that sick in the eye and give them that kind of hope," she said.
For Lewis and others close to Montgomery, who died in November at 31, old emotions have been stirred by the lawsuit Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott filed against Mannatech last month.
Montgomery's experience with Brache is among the incidents cited in the suit, which accuses Mannatech, a Coppell-based multilevel marketer, of allowing its supplements to be sold as cures for cancer and other diseases.
I've seen Mannatech at various bodybuilding competitions in Texas, and they've always seemed to be responsible there, so I think that this story illustrates how one bad apple can spoil the entire barrell.
If supplements are to remain legally available then the industry is going to have to get serious about policing itself and making sure that they aren't allowing hucksters to give the entire industry a bad name.