Drug therapy is the most convenient way to treat most health conditions, often replacing more aggressive therapies, like surgery and hospitalization. Prescription drugs are only available when authorized by a physician, but over-the-counter drugs are those that patients can purchase and administer themselves. However, FDA-regulated drugs are not the only way consumers exercise choice over health and wellness.
Alternative medicine, including dietary supplements, vitamins and herbal elixirs, is yet another way consumers try to improve their health, prevent disease, and take more control of their body. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has a complicated history with alternative medicine. People take supplements for similar reasons as they take drugs, but that is where it gets complicated. The FDA defines a drug as:
…articles intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease and as articles intended to affect the structure or any function of the body…
If supplements are also intended to cure, mitigate, treat, or prevent disease and affects structurers or any function of the body, the FDA will seek to regulate supplements like drugs. If supplements do none of those things, then supplements might be considered useless placebos that should be banned as fraudulent. The FDA has some regulatory power over dietary supplements, and so does the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Supplement regulation was spelled out in the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA) of 1994. The Act was primarily intended to protect supplement manufacturers from FDA interference by creating a regulatory framework that exempted them from most FDA regulations. Nonetheless, there is still tension between the FDA and supplement manufacturers who want to develop products that actual work and regulators who believe that falls within their authority. For example, the FDA fought the sellers of the traditional Chinese supplement, red rice yeast fermented with Monascus purpureus, because the natural byproduct is chemically identical to the cholesterol drug lovastatin.
The Wall Street Journal reports that supplement manufacturers now have a powerful benefactor in Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kenned Jr. Kennedy is a well-known advocate of alternative medicine, wellness and new age therapies. The late Senator Orrin Hatch was also a well-known protector of his constituents in Utah, where supplement manufacturing is concentrated.
The term dietary supplement is something of a misnomer. Alternative medicine advocates have moved well beyond herbal medicine into functional medicine. The following is from WSJ:
When Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. released his MAHA Report in May, a who’s who of the wellness world convened at the White House for the occasion.
All of them support Kennedy’s ascent to the nation’s top health job. And all of them stand to gain from the spotlight he’s placed on alternative health. That’s because each of them has ties to the business of supplements, a $70 billion, lightly regulated U.S. market that could benefit from his support. On Brecka’s podcast, recorded after their wellness treatments, Kennedy vowed to end “the war on vitamins.”
Public health officials and the mainstream medical industry consider alternative medicine much like the snake oil purveyors of the early 20th Century, which prompted the creation of the FDA. It is particularly galling to many that the FDA is now controlled by people sympathetic to alternative medicine. I have read comments in years past saying there is no such thing as alternative medicine. There is only medicine that has a basis in science. More from WSJ:
Alternative approaches to medicine and health have been embraced by MAHA entrepreneurs who have skilfully marketed the promises of supplements to their millions of followers.
“The narrative about being anti-Big Pharma and stepping in in place of pharma is a marketing tool for a lot of these people to then turn around and sell them an alternative solution,” said Jessica Knurick, a registered dietician and public health communicator who has been critical of MAHA.
Kennedy’s agencies within Health and Human Services are now filled with pro-supplement voices.
Although Kennedy’s presence stands to boost business for purveyors of alternative medicine products, arguably the biggest impact will be in driving a shift in the culture of medicine and alternative medicine. It is a missed opportunity that Kennedy and his supporters are not as aggressively trying to boost access to OTC medications as they are alternative medicine therapies.
Read more at WSJ: Supplements Are a $70 Billion Industry. RFK Jr. Is Good for Business