Yes, there's lots of money involved in FDA approvals. Yes, there has been and will continue to be corruption. But over my short life, the access to information has gotten better. The knowledge has gotten better. Most medicines have gotten better.
There was the opiate crisis. There was the nutritional pyramid nonsense. There was the ignorance of sugar and erroneous focus on fat. There was also the shingles vaccine, hep C treatments, fixes to the nutritional recommendations and acknowledgement of problems with sugar.
But I do not have a better option. I certainly am not capable of understanding the human machine by myself. My only hope is that multiple organizations consist of multiple people who are mostly good and mostly right most of the time. And that is something, I think, Americans can be proud about with regards to their civilian agencies.