Homeopathy is the kind of medical treatment that gives Big Pharma executives nightmares.
It’s cheap and easy to find. It has a 200-year track record of delivering results without side effects.
And the doctors who swear by homeopathy? They’re not accepting steak dinners and cruises from drug reps.
Now, after years of homeopathy nipping at Big Pharma’s heels – and its margins – the drug companies and the FDA are getting ready to bite back.
The FDA could be about to unleash new regulations intentionally designed to take homeopathic cures right out of your hands. It’s an attack on your health care freedom – all meant to protect Big Pharma’s bottom line.
Caught in the crosshairs
“Obviously people are alarmed and wondering what the FDA is up to,” Jennifer Jacobs, a homeopath and University of Washington professor, said in a recent interview.
Well, there’s plenty of reason to be alarmed. But there’s no doubt what the FDA is up to.
At the end of April the agency held two days of hearings to discuss “current enforcement policies” on homeopathy. They didn’t meet to discuss how the medicines work and whether they can be a safe and effective alternative to dangerous and expensive prescription drugs.
No, these meetings were held to see whether the FDA should dramatically increase the number of regulatory hoops homeopathic medicines should jump through before they end up on store shelves. These meetings are part of a process by which the FDA will decide whether to bankrupt the industry and take away your access to homeopathic medicines.
You see, homeopathic medicines say right on their labels that they can be used to fight colds, allergies, pain, digestion problems – or whatever else the medicine was designed to do.
And that drives the drug companies crazy. They spend billions getting drugs approved, and they want makers of homeopathic medicines to go through the same process.
It’s a requirement many homeopathic remedy makers wouldn’t be able to afford – and you can bet Big Pharma, the FDA, and everyone sitting around the tables at those April meetings knows it.
The fact is, drug companies have to go through expensive approvals processes so we can determine whether the benefits outweigh the extensive risks that come with prescription medicines. In fact, the majority of the approvals process focuses on this one issue.
But homeopathic remedies don’t carry those same risks – which is why they’re relied upon by millions of people around the world.
The FDA seemed to understand all this when it considered regulatory requirements for homeopathic medicines in 1988. At that time it set specific guidelines – two of the most important being that a remedy must be non-toxic and that it can be sold OTC – no prescription required.
That was also when the FDA decided that homeopathic remedies didn’t need to go through the same FDA approval process as Rx drugs do to be proven safe and effective.
So why bring this up again? I guess you could say that homeopathy is a victim of its own success.
The FDA says that when it last looked, homeopathy was a “multi-million dollar industry.” Now it’s grown to be a “multi-billion dollar” one. And of course, we can’t have billions taken away from Pfizer and Eli Lilly and all their friends without the feds stepping in now, could we?
At the two-day meetings, the FDA even invited an anti-homeopathy group and a professor who is an outspoken critic of the medicines to speak. You can bet the drug companies are behind the scenes pushing for these new requirements – and they’re pushing hard.
Big Pharma is even lining up its allies in the medical community to spread the same old, tired nonsense about homeopathy. You know, about how the heavily diluted plant and mineral ingredients in homeopathic remedies can’t possibly be effective.
They’ll call homeopathy everything from quackery to voodoo, but they’re frightened by it – and they should be. Because there’s a lot more to homeopathy than the mainstream will ever tell you about.
For example:
- Four years ago the Swiss government did a comprehensive report on homeopathic medicine and found it so effective that it said the treatments should be paid for by the country’s health insurance program.
- Homeopathy is the leading alternative treatment used by European doctors.
- Nobel-prize winning doctor Luc Montagnier (who discovered the AIDS virus) conducted his own research that confirmed why those high dilutions in homeopathic medicines are so effective. He said the diluted remedies actually “mimic the original molecules.”
- Studies on the effectiveness of homeopathic remedies have been published in well-respected medical journals over the years such as The Lancet, BMJ, and Pediatrics.
The FDA will be accepting comments about this until June 22, and it’s urgent that you add your opinion –even if homeopathy isn’t your cup of tea.
Because when our freedom to choose what type of treatments we select for ourselves and our family is at stake, every voice counts.
Click here to add your comment at the FDA’s docket page.
Source:
“FDA weighs tighter regulation of homeopathic medicines” Dennis Thompson, April 21, 2015, Philadelphia Inquirer, Philly.com
