Later this month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is holding a public hearing on homeopathic remedies to evaluate its current enforcement paradigm.
According to the agency, which is no friend of natural medicine, it might be time to adjust its homeopathic enforcement policy as much has changed over the past 25 years.
In 1938 when early FDA formation legislation was being proposed, then-Sen. Royal Copeland, a Democrat from New York, succeeded at exempting homeopathic "drugs" from the usual FDA drug approval process.
"In those days, FDA only had authority to require safety evaluation, but when an evaluation of efficacy was added – human trials currently cost billions of dollars – homeopathy remained exempt," explains the Alliance for Natural Health USA (ANH-USA).
There is a possibility that the FDA might try to gain control over homeopathic remedies, which if history is any indicator could result in their removal from the market for being "ineffective" and not backed by "science." (Related: Big Tech and Big Pharma are also trying to "de-platform" homeopathy from being available to consumers.)
Homeopathy is overwhelmingly safe and highly effective for many – and it's already well-regulated
Regardless of your position on homeopathic remedies, the fact remains that they are completely safe and have never, and will never, harm anyone. At worst, they are just sugar pills that function as placebos to help people without the need for dangerous and ineffective pharmaceutical drugs.
We do not support that position, of course, as millions of people rely on homeopathic remedies for their everyday health. But just to play devil's advocate, we are not talking about something that can harm people, even in very large doses.
"Whatever their efficacy, and there is much debate about that, nothing could be safer than homeopathic preparations," ANH-USA says. "Still, it has rankled the FDA not to have authority over this class of medicine, which they would certainly use to remove homeopathic remedies from the shelves."
"In the eyes of the FDA, it seems that the besetting sin of homeopathic preparations, as with supplements, is that they can under certain circumstances compete with FDA-approved Big Pharma drugs – the very drugs that pay the FDA's bills, including staff salaries."
In other words, this is all about the money (as usual). The FDA has long been an extension of the pharmaceutical industry – a rubber-stamp front that grants easy approval to all drugs whose manufacturers pay the piper in the form of the FDA's expensive drug approval process.
It is important to remember that homeopathic remedies are, in fact, already regulated. All of them that are currently available had to first undergo pre-market approval with a monograph from the Homeopathic Pharmacopoeia of the United States (HPUS), a process that ANH-USA explains "involves some clinical verification of the efficacy of the substance."
There is also plenty of science-based research that backs the safe and effective use of homeopathy. In fact, it is one of the most well-studied fields of "alternative" medicine dating back centuries – this despite very little funding, generally speaking.
Much of the assault on homeopathy in the U.S. comes from California where numerous legal cases accuse manufacturers of selling ineffective remedies. It cannot be stressed enough, however, that none of the cases claim homeopathy is unsafe because it is perfectly safe, having never harmed anyone.
ANH-USA has created an Action Alert page for you to contact the FDA to make your voice heard. Please take the time to tell the FDA to leave homeopathy alone.
More of the latest news about the FDA's endless assault on natural medicine can be found at FDA.news.
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