The Pharmaceutical Industry

[Clodfobble]

That's the point. Some people hear those words and can't help but run screaming for the hills, desperate to wash off the dirty hippie cooties.

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by Clodfobble

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I could continue to name them, but my point is you already use and "believe in" a huge number of "natural remedies."
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What's more, untested does not equal disproven.

I'm all for the ones that have been tested and proven. Untested doesn't mean disproven, but it does mean unproven. And if you scroll back, you'll find that my initial post on this thread was in response to "untested home remedies".

Unfortunately, the FDA doesn't regulate them, so there are still some problems. There is no differentiation on the shelves between the ones that are tested and proven, the ones that are untested, and the ones that have been tested and proven useless. So unless you've got the NIH site up on your smartphone as you go down that aisle, you can't tell.

It is all well and good to hold ourselves to a scientific ideal of broad-scale, blind testing for the effectiveness of every single remedy everyone has ever thought of. But the reality is neither the medical or the pharmaceutical companies can meet that ideal, the vast majority of the time. Economic realities taint everything.

The economic reality is that the herbal supplement industry has deliberately avoided being treated as food or drug, despite being sold as something for people to ingest, in order to avoid the requirement that their products be tested. Happily, in 2007 the FDA was given the authority to check that the products at least contain the ingredients on the label. So that's a plus. I'm not sure how homeopathy fits into that, though, as they don't contain any of the ingredient.

Originally Posted by classicman

Not to tail post here, but has the term "natural remedies" really been defined here?
It can mean many different things. Just saying.

Originally Posted by Clodfobble

That's the point.

It's my point too. There's no differentiation on the "natural remedies" shelves between tested and untested remedies, or even between effective and ineffective tested products.

The normal state of the alternative medicine industry is equivalent to when the FDA system fails.