FDA Labeling Requirements Are not Censorship

This is written in response to a recent post by a friend of mine regarding an FDA crackdown on a seller of herbal tea for making a health claim on the label. His claim is that punishing a person for such a claim is censorship. I argue that making health claims that have no been sufficiently tested amounts to act against the public interest - much, the way slander is an act against the public interest, and not speech even though words is the form it takes.

The difference between folk remedies and medicine is simple: the scientific method. Through the process of testing chemicals against controls, scientists can determine that something works by determining how it works. Standardized testing allows the recipient of a treatment know that the pill they are taking or the concoction they are drinking is treating the disease and not just its symptoms. Or, on the other hand, testing allows the recipient of a treatment take a pill to alleviate symptoms with full knowledge of whatever side effects are possible.

This wasn’t the case 150 years ago. I those times, people were afflicted by horrible diseases they didn’t understand. Remedies were scarce - they either hadn’t been invented yet, were too expensive, or simply not available in America’s new frontiers. People feared the consequences of diseases, and suffered through the symptoms.

And in that era thrived the snake oil salesman. He’d listen to your sorrows and sell you hope. He’s sell you ground up shark bones or bear claw. He’d sell you a tincture used by centuries in the orient. He’d sell herbs proven effective by the Indians.

Sometimes the medicine worked. Other times it worked in people’s minds. Sometimes the medicine was nothing more than bunch of booze that made people feel less pain. Sometimes the medicine was spiked with an opiate which beat the pain well ugh that pople actual toht they wre beg ed. Sometimes it was jut snake oil.

The result: there were more drug addicts in the19th century than at any other point in America’s history.

Things aren’t all that different today. People are afflicted by horrible diseases they don’t understand. Remedies are scarce - even though many have been invented - because the price is out of the average person’s reach.

And in this era, snake oil has some new names: herbal remedies, natural cures, accupuncture, and chiropractic to name a few.

A person diagnosed with cancer who can’t afford chemo - or for whom there is no effective treatment - is a scared person, willing to spend their children’s inheritance on a dream.

Now, some of these remedies might do something. But what? And how? And how do we know its not just treating the symptoms? And how do we know that the side effects don't outweigh the benefits? And how do we know whether or not it will have the same effect on different people with different make ups?

Most importantly, how do we protect a person yearning for hope from those who would sell them false hope?

Answer: By requiring those who make health claims with regards to their products comply with strict testing requirements.

Of course, the FDA is a terrible agency that’s in bed with the companies. Bad drugs with little benefit are approved (Viox, Olestra), while new cures that would compete with the big patent holders’ products are stymied. Nevertheless, allowing salesmen to make inadequately proven health claims is not the answer.