Government’s Role in Pharmaceutical Oversight
I have written a lot recently about the pharmaceutical industry’s monopolistic grip on what medicines are and are not available to us. I have discussed how the industry influences government health policy and how the government responds to that influence. All of this begs the question: just what should be the role of government in determining our access to medicines and medical care?
Without question, the government should protect its citizens from harmful drugs and unqualified medical practitioners. In assuming this role, however, the government has extended its authority far beyond protecting to the point of denying public access to reasonably safe and often scientifically proven unconventional products and practices. By reasonably safe, I refer to products and practices that have not been proven adverse to us, have proven to be effective against various health problems, and often have passed rigid clinical trials with great success. Frequently, such products and practices are legally restricted due to potential, but unobserved, side effects or aspects that have been determined risky in other protocols or applications. The same ultra-conservative criteria doesn’t seem to be applied to conventional drugs that have proven to be adverse to human use and even deadly in many cases. Consider, for instance, the prescription drug ads in the print media that require more space for side effect warnings than for the product’s description. How many one-minute drug ads on television have you seen that promote the drug for 20 seconds and warn you about its down sides for 40 seconds. Yet, if we discover any natural, non-toxic alternative to these drugs, government regulatory agencies usually suppress it if it shows any minor side effects or has any question about its efficacy.
The regulatory bias that allows energetic research and testing of conventional proposals while alternative proposals sit on the sidelines is largely due to the political nature of the entire medial community. The momentum of conventional medicine is fueled by big pharma’s dominance of the medical system, the legislature and the government agencies influenced by the largest lobbying effort in the country, and the American health culture of acquiescence to the medial establishment. We will continue to experience rejection by the medical community of promising complementary medicines and therapies as long as the government and other regulatory agencies ensure an non-level playing field in the medical market. The government’s role in pharmaceutical oversight should be to protect its citizens from harmful medicines and bogus practitioners, but without bias as to the philosophical categories in which they belong. It is our obligation to educate our political leaders about integrative medicine and demand that they regulate on fact rather than on political influence.