David Horn:
I guess I missed the boat on what I was trying to say. I was trying to point at the pharmaceutical industry as being more hubristic than malicious. They have an inordinate faith in their abilty to do good. It may be a 'net good', rather than an absolute one, but that's the nature of hubris, isn't it?
David,
Thanks for clearing that up. So for big pharma we have to ponder whether their motives are hubristic, malicious or monetary. I think, all three, but one's personal opinion or experience would determine how they split percentage wise. I hate to get into another long winded discussion, and I apologize in advance, but my experience says monetary, while being malicious as a tool to an end.
Based on the actions they have taken, it would be proper to conclude that big pharma has always considered vitamins, supplements, and herbs as competitors for their market, and has attempted to stiffle them. As covered in my earlier post, pharma controls the FDA and uses it as a tool to try to achieve their objectives.
I have been a vitamin user for many years. The following is my best recollection of the early FDA bullying, and some recent actions.
In the early 1970's, Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling, PhD explained that almost all animals, except man, have working genes for self generation of vitamin C. So for good health, man should supplement in quantities equivalent per pound of their weight to what other animals produce. This was typically about 1,000 mg daily, but needed to be higher if the person was ill, and was safely self limiting by bowel tolerance. At that same time, the physician Shute brothers, were touting the heart attack prevention potential of supplementary vitamin E. To cut off all that nonsense, the FDA proclaimed rules that vitamin supplements must be limited to amounts needed to prevent known deficiency diseases, such as 30 mg or so of C to prevent scurvy, and a similar tiny amount for E.
In 1976, Senator William Proxmire, a primary health advocate, authored what is now known as the Proxmire Amendment, which overruled the FDA, and was really a bill of rights for dietary supplements. It was passed by voice vote in both chambers, with no dissenters. The FDA has made many attempts to subvert this law, but so far has been unsuccessful.
In the early 1990's the FDA got serious about trying to shut down the supplement industry. They set up a gun toting enforcement group which performed raids on manufacturers in attempts to find violations of any rules they could think up. The culmination, to set a scary example to other doctors, was in May 1992, a guns drawn raid on the medical clinic of the man who was probably the world's leading authority of non-pharmaceutical medicine at that time, Dr Jonathan V Wright. They bullied his staff and patients, and commandeered his computers, records and supplies and effectively tried to put him out of business. Their complaint was that he was using an unauthorized supplement; which turned out to be vitamin B injectables imported from Germany -- which he used because they were purer than what was available domestically. No charges were ever filed against him, and his equipment was never returned, but the outrage in congress and in the newspapers put a stop to these Gestapo type raids. Dr Wright and his clinic recovered, and he is still an outstanding spokesman for non-pharma approaches to health protection.
The nonsense still goes on. Merck, from a yeast base, developed the cholesterol lowering statin Mevacor, whose active agent is the chemical lovastatin. The natural food industry had for many years been utilizing a natural product, red rice yeast, for cholesterol reduction. Merck/FDA analysis found that red rice yeast also contained lovastatin, so in 1999 they decreed that because lovastatin was part of an FDA approved drug, the natural yeast was also a drug and was illegal unless they submitted it to the multi-million dollar drug approval process. This effectively shut down the tiny red rice yeast market to protect big pharma's sales.
Even more ludicrous, On October 17, 2005, the FDA sent warning letters to 29 companies that market cherries. They warned that they had to remove the scientific information on their web sites that cherries contained such things as anthocyanins which reduce inflammation, as making health claims classified them as drugs which must have FDA approval to be sold in the United States. So, according to FDA logic, you are not entitled to know what foods are good for you.
One last note, which is more than malicious. Statin suppliers found that the statins not only suppressed the production of cholesterol, but that the same pathway suppressed the production of Coenzyme Q10. CoQ10 is a basic component needed for maintenance of muscle, and other functions. So, along with their patents on the statin, they also filed patents on combination products, containing statins and supplementary CoQ10. But they never announced or marketed the combination product. Now, predictably, many statin users are suffering from the "side effect" of muscle wasting. And, instead of suggesting that people take a despised non-drug supplement like CoQ10 to protect those muscles, they just say look at the good side, your cholesterol numbers have been lowered.
All of this stuff is available for confirmation through google or other search sites.
Norb