when legal loopholes run wild…
Imagine a law which allows anyone to sell you pretty much anything without having to follow any standards or testing the wares being sold for safety provided they wink and tell you that what you’re buying isn’t intended to cure of diagnose any disease and that their claims haven’t been evaluated by anyone. Then, say that you really should buy it to lose weight, feel better, boost your immune system or help you deal with an illness, ensuring that nowhere do they explicitly say the two words they’re not allowed to mention in their product pitch. Is it just me, or does that sounds like a loophole for people to sell whatever they want without consequences and any kind of oversight or regulation, hoping that no one gets hurt and sues them for selling something dangerous, at which point their questionable claims would be brought up in a court of law and taken apart by experts?
Well as odd as it may seem, the U.S. has such a legal loophole. It’s called the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, or DSHEA, and it basically places the burden of making sure that anything marked as a dietary supplement on the manufacturer rather than on the FDA, so all reports on product safety or efficacy depend solely on the sellers’ good will or lawsuits by angry customers. On top of that, the FDA can’t just yank products off the market. It has to prove they’re unsafe before that happens so if you’re selling bottled water you claim is rich with all sorts of miracle minerals and antioxidants that will help your customers live longer, you’ll never be hauled to court or get your products pulled since your product isn’t actively harmful. This is the same law which allows homeopaths to sell sugar pills sprinkled with water they say has magical properties, radiating special mystical energies best explained by rambling technobabble, or a horrendous mangling of physics. Claiming that it’s holistic medicine that treats the whole body, not just the disease (whatever that means), lets them sell whatever they want and make tens of billions of dollars a year doing it. And they’re so good at hiding this lack of regulation in 3 point font of barely legible scrawl on their products, a third of the people buying them don’t even know they’re not FDA approved and aren’t required to be.
And that brings us to the Quack Miranda by which all those pitching “natural cures and treatments” abide. You probably saw it more times than you can count on commercials for diet pills and vitamins flashing a standard template which we outlined with our introduction to the DSHEA. So all those homeopaths and makers of odd, questionable supplements they claim are being suppressed by Big Pharma say that they’re going to cure you in ways that the FDA would never allow because it would cost pharmaceutical companies money and yet, they also warn that the product you’re taking isn’t actually intended to cure any disease. So which one is it? Will the mysterious pill they want you to take cure you or do absolutely nothing? The general response of the quacks is to bombard you with testimonials, which is how pseudoscience and quackery generally spreads according to a scientific study on the subject. But the fact remains, they just sold you something they say can cure some sort of malaise. You know it. They know it too. And so they concoct elaborate conspiracy theories and rely on the good, old fashioned image of a rebel thumbing his nose at the stogy Establishment to convince you that their sly tactics are really for the best. Hell, many of them have been chanting this so long, they’ve bought their own argument hook, line and sinker. Meanwhile, the FDA just looks the other way.
But here’s the big problem. There are thousands of outfits and pseudo-doctors making medical claims which are not subject to any clinical trial or any oversight whatsoever, relying on folksy testimonials and rambling on and on about the virtues of “natural medicine” and “being open-minded.” Instead of freeing up the FDA to keep its eye on Big Pharma and its partners, DSHEA also unleashed a swarm of charlatans selling the modern day version of snake oil. Obviously having the already overburdened, understaffed and under-budgeted FDA also spend time on evaluating millions of placebos isn’t a very good solution to the dilemma. And trying to turn the agency’s focus solely on quacks is also not realistic since Big Pharma are no angels and someone has to be there to make sure they don’t cut corners to bring a product to market and catch their mistakes when they do. But it seems that DSHEA is in dire need of modification which would ban any supplement maker from trying to make medical claims when selling their products unless they submit clinical studies showing their claims to be accurate. Is it placing an expensive burden on the supplement makers? Yes. But if they should never play with people’s lives. Instead of whining about Big Pharma’s sins, they should thrive to be better than them.
People have been harmed and killed by quackery and we have a duty to stop those who profit from promising treatments and cures they haven’t bothered to back up with anything more than rants about the little guy vs. Big Pharma. When you rake in more than $30 billion a year in revenues, you’re not entitled to pretend you’re a little group of healers who just want to make people feel better. You’re an industry, same as those pharmaceutical giants you want to hold accountable for their mistakes. All I ask is that you’re willing to hold yourself to similar standards you want placed on the likes of Pfizer, Merck and GSK. Or of course you could fight it tooth and nail, claiming a Big Pharma conspiracy to put you out of business while in reality, it’s just a ploy used to inspire an outburst of alt med populist rage and freeing you from being held accountable for your actions…
[ illustration by Denis Zilber ]
You do a lot of babbling yourself about preceived problems with natural health. Yes there are snake oil salesmen in every industry. Your Pharma would scare you to death if you actually researched who is behind them. Merck is rather frightening for one.
Most medicine only treats systems and not the underlying cause of the problem. Look at the Pharma commercials ,can you even read the fine print (purposely used small fonts). Did you know that most medicines come from the creation of substances which are found in nature, however you can not patent nature so they try to recreate it in the lab. Only problem is no one can do it better than God. Now they even openly tell you that they don’t know how it works but believe it does.
They use a FEAR mentality to sell their medicine to unsupecting people. They would have you believe the knowledge they possess is what you need. It’s amazing that the FDA doesn’t shut the Pharmas down how many times has a pill been pulled from the market after it has mamed or killed thousands and the Pharma company still deny their product did it.In fact they claim to have been extending life. which is a lie research history in all cultures and today to see how old people live to be. back in the 1600′s-1900′s many lived to be over 80-100.
I challenge you to post what natural products have been sold which have in fact hurt people from taking them. Sounds like you have investments in the Pharma companies or are just ignorant of the truth. Also if you did your research you would find that in EVERY industry the big companies have suppressed stuff that would make life much better for the average person. The electric car, Cures for various diseases, new sources of electricity,etc. Pharma companies spend more than any other industry on advertising,with the intent of producing FEAR,manipulating our minds with psuedo promises of feeling better. Furthermore, It is obvious to the curious onlooker that what they are doing is attacting the human immune system with their pills and surgeries.
They routinely remove vital organs gall gladder,appendix (which by the way they can not even tell you what it’s function is),intestines,etc not to mention ALL the heart surgery they perform which is shocking when you find out how many were actually unnecessary. the list goes on.
So come clean as to who you really are and why you trust medicine with your life when we continually hear about how many things they get wrong(in hospitals they ar3e wrong 60% of the time,check it out) and how many people they hurt without regret i might add. Now compare that with who has been hurt by the natural industry. Anyone can read and study the very things your doctor learned in med school. the problem is that most people unfortunately don’t want to take the time nor do they want the responsibilty of choosing what they should do.How do you know if you have an “A” student or “D” student for a doctor,Is he/she just in it for the money? Sad how many times we see docotrs doing wrong. I remember a few years ago where the country’s top heart surgeons in California where charged with doing over 100,000 unecessary heart surgeries on people.
My family has done much better in the natural than any doctor has ever done.
One recurring problem for women is vaginal yeast infection, which when you go to a doctor they prescribe antibiotics which kill GOOD bacteria in your body which actually makes the problem worse, why you ask, well because science has discovered for sometime now that our immune system depends on this GOOD bacteria to make us well. So their appraoch is to kill ALL the bacteria so you can feel better, but not cure you so you will have to keep coming back to the doctor (the almighty dollar). The problem with this approach is that once on this cycle the women get infections more often.
Now one example of the natural being better is a product called Fem- Dophilious by Jarrow. We have seen at least 10 different women take it instead of the doctor route because they went and the problems kept coming back. After 2 days on this product they felt better and have not had any recurring problems. With the couple that did it was many months later and was resolved easily with the Fem-Dophilious.
I could tell of many more documented results with many natural cures.
We all know that the FDA is a joke and doesn’t regulate much of anything.Look at how many people have suffered from Pharma. Interesting side note the term pharma means “witchcraft, sorceries” check it out. So my hope for you is that you put aside your bias and fully research your subject prior to commenting,because in so doing you mislead people abotu natural vs pharma.
DHSEA is a bad bandage for what is already a bad approach to the whole health supplements/medications arena. One of the challenges for the supplements industry is that if they create a supplement based on say, a concentrate of powdered pumpkin seeds, run double blind placebo studies and discover it actually does cure prostate cancer, then that powdered pumpkin seed tablet is now considered a drug instead of simply a convenient source of a particular food and it’s nutrients. Once you’re a drug then getting your product to market becomes a bureaucratic nightmare. The end result is that in many cases these companies actually have *disincentives* to properly study products they are marketing – and in many cases, actually do believe in.
Pharmaceutical companies obviously don’t want products like this entering their market space, so they lobby against any progressive change in regulations, and supplements companies don’t want to be treated like pharmaceuticals, so they’re against much change too – so you end up with something like DSHEA which at least hopefully limits any dangers, even if it doesn’t get rid of the charlatans.
Your Pharma would scare you to death if you researched who is behind them. … Sounds like you have investments in the Pharma companies or are just ignorant of the truth.
@Dave. And these quotes tells me that the point of the post went way over your head. I know you really want to pitch some natural cure and offer one of those preachy little anecdotes along with the traditional Big Pharma rant, but nowhere in the post was an implication that pharmaceutical companies were little angels (in fact, I explicitly state that they need more regulation to make sure they don’t cut corners), or that their pitch for their products was perfect.
No, the point was that alt med promoters should be willing to hold themselves to the same standards they expect of pharmaceutical companies. When they don’t, and use a legal loophole to do whatever they wish, they’re being hypocrites. I’m sure you know the expression “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones,” right?
They use a FEAR mentality to sell their medicine to unsupecting people.
And this is different from Mike Adams selling his concoctions by scaring patients with cancer that chemotherapy will kill them in horrific ways? Or homeopaths selling their alternatives to vaccination by promoting anti-vax rumors? Or self-appointed “biomed autism experts” who sell fraudulent cures for autism? Please don’t pretend that your rotten apples don’t stink, ok?
… back in the 1600’s-1900’s many lived to be over 80-100.
Yes, and many, many, many more lived to be between 35 and 40. We can certainly go back through history to find long lived historical figures, even by today’s standards. In the late 1700s, we have Ben Franklin who lived into his early 80s. Almost 3,000 years prior, Ramses the Great lived into his 90s. But they were far from the norm.
Also if you did your research you would find that in EVERY industry, big companies have suppressed stuff that would make life much better for the average person.
Here’s an idea. How about instead of telling us to do your homework for you, you give us some evidence for your paranoid conspiracy-speak? It’s not my job to find proof of your fantasies. It’s yours. And do you know why? Because you’re the one making the claims, not me. By avoiding showing us any data what you’re telling the world is that you’re either lazy or just letting your fingers type out whatever random rambling floats into your head. You’re made a whole lot of claims without any backing, and while that may fly in the alt med world where such things as proof and evidence are waived off as the absurd notions of skeptical philistines, it does not work here. Here you will be asked for proof.
And by the way, much of your rant is shown to be false in the links of the post so I’m going to make the long shot assumption that you haven’t actually read the post itself and just spat out your comment as a knee-jerk reaction.
I challenge you to post what natural products have been sold which have in fact hurt people from taking them.
Well, let’s see. Zicam and some of its competitors caused 130 people to loose their sense of smell. Permanently. Diet pills have been found to have illegal or dangerous ingredients and are blamed to have contributed to a number of deaths. The Gonzalez protocol has been found to be worse for cancer patients than just doing nothing in a clinical study which aimed to prove it’s worth. And do you not count “natural products” that didn’t actually do anything but provide a placebo for genuinely sick people to be harmful since those patients haven’t sought treatment and their disease progressed when it should’ve been treated?
Only problem is no one can do it better than God.
[brief laughter-induced paralysis]
Do you chew willow bark instead of taking an aspirin?
Name a suppliment that doesn’t involve human/mechanical intervention? Most have chemical intervention as well. If “no one could do it better than God,” then the best treatment method would be to simply pluck a leaf off the tree and gnaw on it. Certianly wouldn’t require the lengthy process required to manufacture homeopathic magic water.
I challenge you to post what natural products have been sold which have in fact hurt people from taking them.
I don’t need to: There are plenty of other examples, but this one collects sooo many. And even though I’m usually loathe to refrence wikipedia for something like this, they have a rather nice list of dangerous side effects of “medicinal herbs” that sound pretty similar to the disclaimers in Pharma ads. And I hate drug ads, actually.
The article stated pretty clearly that Pharma Co. is no angel. The government oversight that’s there is necessary – and some could say it should be stricter. However, the “suppliment loophole” is far more dangerous, since there’s no consistent oversight. How would you feel if Big Pharma just reclassified all of their drugs as “suppliments?”
The illustration in the article says it all. Doctors standing around watching as you down some drugs. If your article was un-bias it would have target big pharma since they are the ones profiting from peoples ignorance far beyond any natual suppliment manufacture! Go cash your big pharma pay cheque!
An additional thought to my previous post. Lets look at who profits most from bringing drugs to market. These corporations are bending data, covering the truth. Natural vitamins are just that “natural” and if vitamins can’t help someone than nothing can! Health is not something you get in a bottle. Health is only obtained through a full spectrum of disiplinary life choices. The problem is people cant understand this and think they can find quick cures. At least the “natural” community is making an attempt to educate the masses where big pharma continues to keep people in the dark!
If your article was un-bias [sic] it would have target [sic] big pharma… Go cash your big pharma pay cheque!
I’m afraid that pharmaceutical companies just don’t want to pay for a post which says that the FDA should keep a close eye on them because they’re no angels and that a so-called “natural supplement manufacturer” should strive to show Big Pharma how well he can meet and exceed the same standards set for pharmaceuticals.
Natural vitamins are just that “natural” and if vitamins can’t help someone than [sic] nothing can!
So are lead, arsenic, and a wide variety of poisons and toxins extracted from snakes, spiders and frogs. Are you going to down any of those things just because they’re all natural? And where does that leave uranium? Radiation is natural so it must be a-ok for you according to your logic. Oh and by the way, what supernatural ingredients do pharmaceutical companies use since apparently they’re not using “natural” products which can help everyone ?
Also, why we’re at it, with what exactly are vitamins supposed to help? Nutrition and a host of common disorders caused by a bad diet and a sedentary lifestyle? Sure. But to beat terminal diseases? Not really.
At least the “natural” community is making an attempt to educate the masses where big pharma continues to keep people in the dark!
Educating the public with nonsense and pseudoscience presented as some kind of “hidden truth” for a quick and easy profit is just as bad as keeping people in the dark to make money off those looking for a quick fix.