What's one little word?
These two standards appear quite similar:
Medicines must be safe and effective
Medicines must be safe or effective
But safe OR effective.... well, drinking a gallon of gasoline will effectively arrest tumor growth in a cancer patient, along with all other metabolism. And a small glass of distilled water would surely be a safe cancer treatment.
Neither one is a legitimate treatment, for obvious reasons.
But that's cancer... for a headache or sniffles, who cares if people are charged money for fake medicine as long as it isn't posion, right?
There was a time when all over the counter medicines were required to have been demonstrated to work on most folks and to not be readily fatal. They didn't work all the time on everyone, and you could OD if you worked hard enough at it, but everything put on the shelves to treat your headache or cough was reasonably safe and reasonably effective.
Go to a drug store today. There will be a lot of OTC "medicines" on the shelves with no proven, or sometimes not even any claimed, efficacy. Truly fake medicine. And you have to study the damn things to make sure that what you are buying is actually any kind of medicine at all.
But those newer entrants in the halls of "medicine" are certainly safe. They are safer than breath mints.
I think this happened in the 1990s, and I think it involved one key congressional Republican and aspiring witch doctor... but abetted by crackpots of all stripes who were tired of their pet remedies being discriminated against and persecuted by the FDA for the trivial offense of not working.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Evidently, this doesn't have to be effective - it doesn't claim to do anything.
