Re: An agency for natural alternatives?
I wish I could share your dream here, I really do. But I think that the reality is that big business would do the same thing with effective natural medications that they have with ineffective synthetic ones - make huge profits and put them out of the reach of those who lack the money or insurance to pay for them.
If somehow enough of the aging rich, famous and powerful whom modern medicine has failed could be convinced to turn to natural alternatives and see good results, then maybe that might help us maintain and perhaps improve access to natural and alternative treatments. It possibly could even lead to publicly funded studies and mechanisms to get more natural alternatives approved without the hundreds of millions of private capital it takes to get a man-made drug to market.
Ultimately, though, you come up against a trillion dollar juggernaut that is fraught with greed and corruption. Their only marketplace is our bodies - and they will not give up without a horrendous struggle when it comes to threatening that marketplace with safer, more effective and less expensive competition that actually cures illnesses. We are not just talking about a typical for-profit industry simply thinking of itself, it's shareholders interests, and profits here. Not when those interests take precedence over the interests of humanity and when the profits come at the expense of our health!
No, we are talking about an industry with a horrific criminal past - and present - who has demonstrated their callous disregard for human life and suffering for over a century when it comes to money and power; an industry that rigs studies and brings drugs they KNOW are unsafe, like Vioxx, to market and kill tens of thousands at a time for the sake of huge profits; and an industry whose top managers were sentenced to prison in Nuremberg for crimes against humanity because of the horrible experiments they conducted on the prisoners who they first used as slave labor to build the huge medical facility for the IG Farben drug cartel at the same time they built the infamous sister deathcamp facility: IG Auschwitz.
Despite the horrors of the Third Reich, the world has not become a kinder, gentler place in the intervening half century since those prisoners were released from prison and returned to their management positions at the helms of the worlds largest pharmaceutical companies at the behest of then Secretary of State and former business partner Rockefeller - especially when money and greed are involved.
As evidenced by the actions of their puppet agency, the FDA, in suppressing and persecuting safer, cheaper and more effective natural competition for the sake of profit and detriment of humanity, they have already proven that they will stop at nothing to maintain their domination - and a new agency for natural alternatives would be no exception. If they could not prevent it, they would set out to control it. Look no further than what they are doing and have done with CODEX and proposed new FDA guidelines.
As I said it is a really great idea. An admirable one even. I just wish I could believe in it.