Quote:
Originally Posted by Revert
G5 is on to something, go natural, healthcare in the US is a joke. I can't afford insurance and my job won't insure me for another year, basically i'm screwed.
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The problem with "natural therapies" is that we have NO empiric data on how they work, we have only anecdotes. The process by which we study drugs and their utility in various conditions certainly is not perfect, but nevertheless it's pretty functional and it has helped us develop powerful therapies for a number of different disease states, including high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, infectious diseases, and thyroid dysfunction, to name but a few.
Herbal medicine may be effective, but the point is those claims are not tested in a manner which offers measurable, reviewable data. Therefore, these therapies are essentially a black box and much of the time we simply don't know what good (or bad!) they can do to a person. A famous example is reserpine, which is one of the oldest antihypertensive drugs known, existing long before the time of big pharma and which was essentially a herbal medicine for much of its time in use. When it was studied carefully however, only within the latter part of the previous century, we came to realize that it is associated with a higher rate of suicide, precipitating concerns regarding its effects on depression and people with depression.
I think people find it easy to connect the idea of corporations such as pharm companies with the notion that there are sinister conspiracies to profit from people's helplessness or general ignorance, but if we pay attention we ought to realize that herbal supplements don't have nearly the same level of regulation or accountability that pharm drugs do.
I'm not suggesting everybody go out and get a prescription or three just on general principle, but certainly if you're going to make a choice to distrust the drug industry it ought to be with an understanding of why the medical establishment uses "drugs" versus "herbs."
Quote:
Originally Posted by Salika
I'm not saying the FDA is completely useless, but just because something is or is not 'FDA approved' does not mean it's bad or good for you.
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"FDA approved" basically means that someone has demonstrated through a formalized study that a drug is effective for a particular indication and that the risks of using that drug for that indication are outweighed by the benefits.
However, it is worth noting that much of the time doctors use drugs in an "unapproved" fashion on the basis of the drug's biochemical properties or the understanding of its physiologic effects.
For example, drug X may not be "approved for use" to treat asthma in pediatric patients simply because it was never studied, but it may have been proven in adults and a doctor might use it "off-label" because he believes it will work the same.