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Comment by clumsysmurf | Hacker News Reader

“FDA’s war on public health is about to end,” Kennedy wrote. “This includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals and anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma."

Anyone know what chelating compounds he is talking about?

He mentions clean foods, but the Trump EPA is protecting corporations from regulations more than its protecting citizens from pollution.

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It's about EDTA. It can be legitimately used to treat heavy metal poisoning, plus some other things. Some people (who are probably misguided) want to self-medicate. The FDA won't let you. Hence, drama.

yeah, because unless you legitimately have heavy metal poisoning, the side effects DEFINITELY aren't worth it

Probably, but the process doesn't work that way. The default is that you can't sell medication to people, period. Some pharmaceutical company applied to have a specific form of EDTA approved as a prescription drug, and that was that.

Separately from this, substances that meet the criteria of being "natural" can be sold as supplements as long as you don't claim they cure anything. EDTA is naturally-occurring and you can buy it as a supplement in the US, although the FDA has some beef with this, which I think is what the original remark might be alluding to.

EDTA is also a common food additive and a laboratory reagent, so people who want to use it can buy it easily, which makes the whole debate basically performance art.

So in summary, the FDA prevents you from marketing something as a medicine unless you have gone through the approval process and developed all the regulatory apparatus around a medicine (e.g. packaging, suppliers, prescription guidelines, etc)?

Yes. Look, I'm not arguing this is bad, I'm just trying to respond to the original question and capture the essence of the debate.

There are three pertinent points: (1) it's EDTA; (2) it's not that EDTA is safe or not safe, it's that no one applied to have it approved as an OTC medication; (3) you can still (probably) sell EDTA as a supplement in the US, but the FDA grumbled about it, which angered various chelation cranks.

Iron, copper, zinc, cobalt, manganese and selenium are "heavy metals."

"Heavy metal" in general is a bad term, but especially when used as a proxy for toxin. There is no universal definition of heavy metal and there is no inherent connection to toxicity in any specific organism.

Then again, pretty much every metal is toxic at some relatively low body-mass concentration, even iron (which actually can and does kill people, especially when children eat adult iron supplements).

Even lovely unreactive gold does have compounds that are toxic.

EDTA removes all metals. It's simply a compound that forms water-soluble complexes with metal ions, removing them from the body.

The way idiots kill their children with it is that among other metals, it removes calcium ions, and those are necessary for life, with low enough concentration in blood eventually resulting in cardiac arrest.

So said idiots have an autistic child, read junk online that tells them that "toxins" caused this, find the compound that is legitimately used to remove toxins, and administer enough to end the autism. By stopping their child's heart.

I don't particularly like the FDA, but restricting the availability of EDTA is not something I'd criticize.

If you have such parents, you basically lost the game of life without having a chance to participate much. The only real solution would be to forcibly and permanently take children away from such people, not something I see flying in US if we don't include ie physical abuse or pedophilia.

I feel like a basic human life value has decreased recently. Be it ongoing brutal wars, news pushing doom and gloom 24/7, covid certainly didnt help or something similar. A bit like reversal to medieval times when cruel public executions were a spectacle for whole town and families and life of individual was truly worthless.

If thats the case, let the dumb die including offsprings, just don't let their bills to be picked up by society. Extremely cruel, but it seems we are heading that way, and we have this little thing called overpopulation. Extreme freedom with extreme consequences.

Yeah this is one of those situations where people freak out about their neighbor's behavior and try to change who they are with administrative policy. It's really just counter productive.

I think better would be for people to be more personally picky who they share spaces with.

That was my first reaction to this article too: "Ok, gutting the FDA is bad, but the destruction of some other agencies that are not even mentioned in this article actually has worse consequences. If someone believes the quacks, takes Ivermectin or EDTA and dies, that's fine for me - I hope they at least get a Darwin Award for their effort!". But when you think about people doing this to other people (including but not only children) who can't decide for themselves, it gets much more complicated...

Wow, that's an interesting rabbit hole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_metals.

> Even in applications other than toxicity, no widely agreed criterion-based definition of a heavy metal exists. Reviews have recommended that it not be used. Different meanings may be attached to the term, depending on the context.

Not allowing self medication was probably a mistake.

I find this quote so fascinating. Who makes ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine? Pharma companies! Who makes vitamins and supplements? Massive corporations! Is there a single doctor on the planet who doesn't tell their patients that sunshine and exercise are good for them?

> Is there a single doctor on the planet who doesn't tell their patients that sunshine and exercise are good for them?

Yes, because doctors are secretly plotting alongside with big renewables to trap sunshine with solar panels and imprison it in batteries. They don't want patients to compete with them for access to sunshine.

The raw milk thing is funny to me in a semi-morbid way i guess, i find it for sale all over the place and more expensive then just regular, even organic, whole milk. Pasteurization doesn't seem to be some evil ultra-processing of milk, it just kills bacteria that can make you sick. There's no preservative or other additives that i'm aware of. Pasteurization just doesn't seem like something anyone would get worked up about but here we are.

Well the thing is that they want the enzymes and bacteria that pasteurization kills. There is limited (but existing) published research that shows the naturally existing enzymes aid digestion and immune function.

Back about 15 years ago before it became a weird culture war issue, my sister, who had a diagnosed casein allergy (casein is the main protein in milk), found that she could consume raw milk without any adverse effects.

"We do our peers, countrymen, students, and children a grave disservice by admonishing them to think for themselves without also giving them the critical thinking tools to do so, for in so doing we foster a culture where "independent thought" is equated with "contrarian thought". This gives rise to an anti-intellectual, anti-science paradigm that supports an idea not because it meets a basic standard of evidence, but rather simply because it opposes established thought. This is worse than the intellectual calcification that stagnant "herd thinking" would give rise to, because it doesn't simply halt progress — it puts it in full retreat."

Important quote! Citation?

stevenAthompson from HN.

Excellent statement, but who is the "great man" who once said this?

To tell the truth, I don't remember. I've kept a "quotes.txt" file for the last two or three decades where I paste in anything I feel is worth remembering. It's been in there as long as I can remember, but I apparently didn't bother with a proper attribution.

I want to guess Oliver Wendell Holmes for some reason, but it doesn't read like something he said. Sorry I can't be more helpful.

I don't know who said the above, but the following is from Isaac Asimov:

"Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge'"[0]

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/84250-anti-intellectualism-...

And I'd add that as Peter Medawar correctly pointed out[0][1]:

"The USA is so enormous, and so numerous are its schools, colleges and religious seminaries, many devoted to special religious beliefs ranging from the unorthodox to the dotty, that we can hardly wonder at its yielding a more bounteous harvest of gobbledygook than the rest of the world put together."

[0] https://www.azquotes.com/quote/1064507

[1] As a middle-aged American who's lived their whole life in the US, this quote is spot on.

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