I'm drug discovery and the FDA absolutely _does_ keep all the crazies in check.
Many people died during that golden age, and don't forget that the same golden age produced many of the problems we're drowning in / trying to fix today (PFAS, etc.)
Many people died during that golden age, and don't forget that the same golden age produced many of the problems we're drowning in / trying to fix today (PFAS, etc.)
I've written about this before. Basically, the FDA's position is that it's better for 10,000 patients to die of neglect than have 1 patient die of quackery.
Drug development is in shambles because the FDA requires >99.99% confidence that pharmaceutical companies are not selling quack cures. Do we need that level of confidence? Especially for cancer, is that degree of confidence warranted? Is the process efficient?
There's legitimate fear of quack medicine -- and then there's whatever the FDA is gripped by, which seems to me a lot like insanity.
> PFAS
Not exactly something that goes through the usual drug approval process. What other problems come to mind?
There's quite of bit of quackery just with nutritional supplements, too. And people and companies try to bypass the FDA all the time with fake cures, the COVID-19 epidemic was just the latest version of that.
The FDA is over-zealous with their testing requirements. However, without them we will see an explosion of fake cures for everything. The legitimate pharma companies will lose money, or otherwise start cutting a lot of corners in the pursuit of profit.
We need something like the FDA to keep things in check.
I'd run interference on this some years ago, before the emergence of the public Internet / WWW, and ... it was already bad enough. Whilst online fora are often praised as being of tremendous benefit to patients and caregivers of chronic or terminal conditions, increasingly they're overrun by that same set of dramatis personae, and it absolutely, absolutely boils my blood.
There are criticisms to be made of the FDA and Pharma, but for the most part those engaged are largely subject to poor incentives rather than outright fraud and opportunism.
One of the tremendous values of jseliger's account is his exploration of alternatives, and candid commentary (especially recently) of how even what does work for a while can stop working.
Cancer is a complex set of phenomena which share a common symptom: unconstrained "crab" growth (the tendrils which spread outward from tumors). In German, "cancer" is literally "krebs", that is "crabs" (which of course has its own confusing connotations in direct translation to English). What's coming to be appreciated is that each individual cancer case is ultimately its own evolving community which adapts to, and often overwhelms, the treatments and countermeasures deployed against it. That said, there are cancers which are remarkably amenable to treatment, and are wholly curable. Others not so much. Details in this case matter immensely.
Crayfish, I think. The German for crab is Krabbe. (AFAIK.)
it might take some time to reconcile your points though, some moderate data might help, what do I know, being peripheral to drug-development..