In 1994 Congress passed The Dietary Supplemens Health and Education Act which requires that the FDA prove that a dietary supplement is dangerous before it can be ordered off the shelves. A strong lobby is the health food consortium.
I think that Act has caused a lot of dangerous products to flood the market. Several decades ago, the FDA was going to limit the strength of vitamins since some vitamins in excess are dangerous. The health stores got their patrons to petition their congressmen, and FDA was prevented from doing that.
Drugs must go through rigorous testing before they can be marketed. They must prove both to be safe and efficacious. These products are presumed to be safe, and effectiveness is irrelevant. Where is the logic in that? Especially since some so-called dietary supplements are really drugs; i.e., DHEA and others. It is my understanding that DHEA cannot even be sold with a prescription in Canada. Our Canadian buddies can chime in on that.
Companies make that statement because altho the DSHEA allows a supplement to claim that it may affect a body structure or function, it cannot claim that it can treat, cure or prevent a disease, unless that has been proven.
The companies that market supplements and herbal drugs have a powerful weapon apart from lobbyists - the patients who are soured on traditional medicine or unable to find help for their chronic problems. Many of these people are easily propagandized into jumping to the aid of the mass marketers whenever some attempt is made to regulate medical claims or quality of preparations. The F.D.A. is painted as an evil government force that wants to take away alternative drugs. Here’s one example:
You’d be amazed how people buy into this sort of conspiracy theory.
There are real problems with poorly standardized preparations, ineffective or dangerous products (fatalities linked with contaminated L-tryptophan and ingestion of comfrey are examples) and outright quackery in the alt med field that discourage acceptance of genuinely efficaceous and promising herbal drugs, and I think it’s a shame that the F.D.A. continues to be muzzled in its attempts to protect the consumer.
Yes, I know all about the morbidity and mortality associated with prescription drugs. At least they’re consistently backed by rigorous research, required to be effective and closely regulated. It’s time herbal and supplement drugs were given the serious attention they deserve.
The scary thing is that pharmaceutical companies are trying to get in on the craze by branching into what they’re calling “naturaceuticals”. The line between medicine and quackery continues to blur…
Seems like alternative medicine wants to have its cake and eat it to. On the one hand, they protest that the scientific community won’t investigate their therapies because naturual healing is cheaper than mainstream medicine, see, and meanwhile the dietary supplement industry and homeopath snake-oil pedalers are making money hand over fist. At the same time they lobby against giving the FDA the power to regulate their products which would require, um, investigation of their therapies by the scientific community.
Are you implying that the medical industry doesn’t want something to be cheap?
The millions of dollars that pharmaceutical companies pour into drug development isn’t done because they then want to charge an arm and a leg for it. They’d be happier not paying the millions in the first place.
Some major news organizations have, through sloppy and credulous reporting given credibility to alternative health hucksters and made it more difficult for the FDA to gain a role in oversight.
USA Today has been a repeat offender, most notoriously through its series by reporter and breast cancer patient Cathy Hainer. Hainer went on an odyssey through a variety of quack cures including a diet and “colon cleanse” regimen straight out of the 19th century snake oil archives - with scarcely an eyebrow raised by her editors at all the outlandish claims made in the articles. It’s doubtful any of this helped Hainer, whose cancer proved fatal, and we’ll never know how many other patients died because they gave up on effective therapy to pursue the remedies she touted.
Indeed, the media is a big problem. Usually this is because they feel that anything that is of interest to a lot of people is automatically “valid” in some sense. Thus, they will report on whatever some quack alternative medicine practitioner has to say and then throw in a couple of lines from a real doctor to be able to say it was “balanced.”
Not me! I was just passing along what I’ve heard from various “alternative” sources. I think their complaints are completely invalid. Sorry that I didn’t make that clear.
My dad had a big plastic jar of “Colon Cleanse” on his shelf a few years back. It had a drawing of a large intestine on it and the words “Cleanse your colon with Colon Cleanse.”
Frankly, I fail to see the marketing genius in such a slogan and package.
AYNRANDLOVER: ** The millions of dollars that pharmaceutical companies pour into drug development isn’t done because they then want to charge an arm and a leg for it.**
It is, exactly because they do want to charge an arm and a leg. And more. That’s why they are in business: to make money. The more, the merrier. They’d be happier not paying the millions in the first place.
Of course. They are “not paying the millions”, they invest in R&D. The profit margin in drug industry is much higher than average; return on equity, for instance, is 2.21 times higher than 41-industry average.
So to answer your question:Are you implying that the medical industry doesn’t want something to be cheap?
is to say YES and NO. YES, they want R&D to be cheap. NO, they do not want drugs to be cheap. And they do not want you to die. They want to walk the fine line: to keep you alive, but sick, so you come to them to buy expensive drugs (preferably, with government’s help).
I read something on the web (can’t find it now). It looks that one may call her wares "a dietary supplement”. If no specific claims are made, it’s free to sell. So, in theory, one may come up with a ‘dietary supplement’ called “Viabra”, label it “Dietary supplement. Take I capsule before bedtime” and voila’!
It looks like one can sell hormons and what not, unregulated, as long as no specific claims are made. “Educated consumer is our best customer!”. OTOH, if you say “This is “Ginseng. It will stimulate blah-blah-blah…”, it will be FDA regulated.
I will post links as soon as I find them.
That’s interesting. When I was temping at the regional cancer center here in town, we had a patient who was doing the exact same thing to treat her breast cancer: macrobiotics, Mexican healers, mud baths, etc etc. Well, her (easily treatable) breast cancer turned in bone cancer and she finally agreed to radiation therapy but the doctors told her it was really just palliative, life-extending treatment at that point; she hadn’t treated it soon enough.
I am all for alternative medicine but I am also for having a skeptical eye regarding both alterantive AND western medicine.
BUNNYGIRL, you are right.
Even for me, with some knowledge, it’s often hard to decide. I mean, in 95% or so, Western medicine is good. Look around, because of it, we live twice as long now, on average. Some of “folk” medicine is good, most is neutral, and some could be bad, especially for already sick person who does not have time to experiment. It often (usually) is not easy to make a choice. Example: I know many people who take St. John’s wort with good results. But I know many who can’t sleep or have headaches while they take it. And so on. And on. And on.
As a point of clarification, I should mention that Cathy Hainer reported having initially had conventional chemo for metastatic breast cancer with no detectable disease following treatment. Then she went on her Magical Mystery Tour through quackdom; whether or not she kept up with her mainstream med checkups I don’t know. What was repulsive was the way her articles promoted baseless alternative hucksterism as though it was valid therapy.
This is true in theory. In reality, you can say just about anything you want and rake in lots of bucks before an intimidated and underfunded FDA gets around to telling you to cut it out.
We are truly living in a new Golden Age of Snake Oil.
This is true in theory. In reality, you can say just about anything you want and rake in lots of bucks before an intimidated and underfunded FDA gets around to telling you to cut it out.
We are truly living in a new Golden Age of Snake Oil.
**
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It’s not only theory. DHEA is a hormone that is a precursor of estrogen and testosterone, production of which declines with age. This is not a food supplement, but a drug, yet FDA cannot regulate it because it is classified as a food supplement. (Fitness Swimmer, January/February 1999.)
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