The Right Place for Medicine is Distant from Both the Failures of Regulatory Excess and the Failures of Snake Oil

It is possible to think that (a) FDA regulators are not all that interested in much other than protecting their own positions, and their actions impose a terrible cost on health and longevity by suppressing progress in medicine, (b) that some degree of reviews and trials and data and proof are a great idea, necessary to the development of new therapies, and can be handled in a distributed way in a free market, and (c) people who run so far from the FDA that they drop the reviews and trials and data and proof, replacing them with marketing and wishful thinking, are not doing anyone any favors. This collection of sensible ideas is, sadly, somewhat distant from the mainstream position these days, which appears to be that anything that isn't the full and complete FDA process (twice as lengthy and expensive today as it was ten years ago) is so dangerous as to be unworthy of consideration. This absolutism is unhelpful, to say the least. It is particularly pernicious when biased against patient paid trials, as is the case in the article here, for no particularly solid reason. Patient paid studies are a powerful tool when arranged well, carried out in search of large and reliable effects. The rest of the population is the control group, and it is sometimes possible to find funding in this way for very useful studies that would otherwise be overlooked. When it comes to balancing scientific rigor against other influences, the anti-aging movement has long been a mixed bag....
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs