Every few years the FDA makes a new attempt to shut down, or to limit your access to homeopathic medicines. The reasons they do this is because the alternative medicine sector is a headache for them and their best friends, the large pharmaceutical companies and they get paid over half a billion dollars in revenue by Big Pharma to support their operations Homeopathic medicines which have been available since the early 1800’s do not require billions of dollars in new drug testing and approval.
In 2010, the last year that statistics are available, Drug companies paid the FDA $529,276,543 in fees covering the application for new drugs, establishment fees, and product fees. For the FDA, this is a significant revenue source. According to the FDA, >80% of new drug applications are eventually approved.
Homeopathic medicines do not have to pay the FDA any money. The formulations as listed in the HPUS (Homeopathic Pharmacoepia of the U.S.) have for the most part been around for a long time, and have a proven history of safety.
The FDA states that it has seen a “corresponding increase in safety concerns, including serious adverse events” resulting from homeopathic products. However, could the real problem be that the U.S. market for homeopathic medicines has grown to over $3 billion and may be encroaching on the sales of pharmaceuticals?. The FDA’s friends at big Pharma are certainly not happy about this. Why would a consumer pay his doctor for a prescription that might cost hundreds of dollars (plus the office visit), when a natural medicine might work and only cost him ~$10. Or perhaps, as we have written, the FDA is staffed by people who come from or are biased towards the pharmaceutical industry and are protecting their real employer by writing new regulations that are harmful to Big Pharma’s competitors. We have written many articles about this phenomenon:
May 2017 – New FDA commissioner approved – what it means to health foods
January 2015 – FDA’s revolving door – why you eat GMO’s
April 2015 – FDA is planning to take away your homeopathic medicines and what you can do
June 2015 – Please send your comments to FDA to keep all your health care choices available
August 2015 – FDA is attempting to limit access to compounded medicines
January 2016 – Nominee for New FDA Commissioner tied to Big Pharma
March 2016 – Who is really in charge of your FDA?
Does it seem reasonable for the FDA to claim they protect the consumer from homeopathic drugs when over 100,000 people die each year from prescription drugs. Over the past 27 years — the complete time frame that the data has been available — there have been over 3 million deaths related to prescription drug use. Big Pharma and their shills like to point to possibly a few hundred people that may have died supposedly as a result of the homeopathic medicine. However, on closer inspection of their claims, it was not the homeopathic medicine necessarily that had anything to do with causing the death. More likely it was the doctor prescribing it for a purpose that it was not designed to treat.
If you find all of this disturbing, that your freedom to choose may be at risk because a government agency that regulates those choices may be managed by one powerful segment of the industry that has the money and power to buy influence and possibly destroy its competitors due to their ability to insert their own people into regulatory positions within the FDA, then you are not alone. Perhaps you might want to join me on a trip to see some coral reefs in the western Caribbean to forget about this.
