Vitamin, Mineral, and Herb Ban

Please educate yourself and fight.

http://www.jcrows.com/HealthSupplementsRIP.html

http://www.alliance-natural-health.org/

Blair rigged the ballot over here to favour pharma lobbies who wanted to ban their natural health competition. Ban comes into play in March 2005. ANH now seeking to overturn.....

 

The world has gone mad. Another great move from the EU. I hope this does not materialise, as I do take quite a few herbal supplements....

:MILD:

 

its already law. Law kicks in 2005. It pretends to be an act of EU standardisation, but in reality the pharma companies have been lobbying hard to eradicate competition for expensive profitable patented drugs.

 

These 'natural health'-type products should be banned in order to protect the more credulous & ill-informed members of the public who waste their money (and in some cases, endanger their health) by taking them.

Not all 'natural' things are automatically safe.

 

Some people can be trusted to take safe amounts.

Some people are helped greatly by supplements.

Pharmaceutical drugs kill more people than supplements. In fact, supplements have rarely killed. In fact, pharmaceutical drugs are the 4th greatest killer of human beings.

I'll side with better i.e. more open-minded docs on this one i.e. dr Rath and Linus Pauling.

Of course your argument doesn't work when you consider state-sanctioned genocide by cigarettes and alcohol.

I have a right to supplement with vitamin C etc. The pharma lobby has no right to force chemical healthcare.

 

I've got to agree with The Devil, I'm afraid.

At work, I am responsible for conducting studies which support regulatory submissions for new product approval by worldwide goverment bodies (not pharmaceuticals, but in an even more contentious area), so I know how much effort goes into developing new products and ensuring their safety.

Every new pharmaceutical will have undergone very extensive safety testing and the toxicological nature of the drug will be well understood, and will likely be safe for prescribed use.

OTOH, natural herbal remedies often contain high quantities of natural products that most likely have never been properly tested and therefore the risks of long tem use are completely unknown. A lot of naturally occuring chemicals can be very nasty in a high enough concentration.

Without proper regulation and safety data, I know what I'd rather use.

 

Again I'll side with the infinitely more knowlegable Professor Linus Pauling, and DR Rath.

Are you saying vitamins and minerals are killers? Intrinsically more dangerous than pharmaceutical drugs? Produce the evidence. There is none. Most people consume supplements safely.

 

No, I'm not saying that, but I'd rather use products whose long term safety has been thoroughly tested.

I'm also not saying they shouldnt be used, just that they should be properly tested and regulated.

 

http://www4.dr-rath-foundation.org/

 

i didn't mean to be rude btw.. i just get very worked up by this issue....

 

How dare the pleb's think for themselves and self medicate natural herbal remedies We don't have an overworked, underfunded NHS service just so people can swan off buying their own cold remedies instead of sitting for hours on end in a Doctors waiting room sharing their germs.

My god, next thing you know is that people will be taking their own health seriously and actually decide to eat less junk food and do more excercise. Oh, the horror!! Can you imagine the embarrassment to the Government if there were no NHS waiting lists.

We must put a stop to this nonesense right now! The sooner we have laws to stop people thinking for themselves the better. Keep everyone indoors I say! Give McDoBurgerHut the franchise to feed the UK with anibiotic laced unspecified animal proteins; infact they could liquidise it and pump it direct into our veins. Why bother with houses. Cocoons filled with warm liquid goo would be better, we could live virtual lives. Hmm nice, the Matrix has you

 

An infinitely less knowledgable physician writes...

You may believe whatever you wish, Mr Bumboy. It is a fact that herbal remedies and 'nutritional supplements' are not universally safe in the recommended dosages, and it remains to be proved whether any of them are of any benefit at all.

OTOH, placebos can be reasonably 'effective' for some illnesses. Dr Rath reminds me of Dr Andrew Wakefield. A conspiracy theorist? Publicity-hungry?

Best of luck, Mr Bumboy.

 

a while ago i tried st johns wort - a 'natural' antidepressant. no side effects were mentioned in any of the literature i read. unfortunately my body and st johns wort didn;t get on and explosive diorrhia resulted. i'd like to see better information and testing of natural remedies especially if, like st john wort, it's presented as an alternative to something like an anti depressant.
it's a contencious issue as there are a lot of people out there that these drugs are helping however i certainly am now quite cautious about what suppliments i take (although i do take quite a few every morning).
maybe the new regulations are a bit draconian but i think at the end of the day everyone is going to be better off if they are better informed.
cheers


julian

 

Re: An infinitely less knowledgable physician writes...

What you are saying is nonsense. There are plenty of herbs with proven beneficial effects: St John's, Echnacea, Milk thistle, etc. There are even more vitamins and minerals with proven beneficial effects e.g. inositol, B6, vitamin C, vitamin E, etc. Dr Rath does have a little problem with style and presentation, but he is genuine and he does have credibility. Nobel winner Prof Linus Pauling advocated highy doses of vitamin C, and there is much evidence to support the health benefits of high-dose vitamin C.

This legislation has nothing to do with protection of consumer health and everything to do with removing competition for patented pharmaceutical drugs. He who pays the piper.....

 

lol

 

Thalidomide....

I don't trust pharma companies much to be honest; they're out to make a profit; how can we be sure that "independent" tests are *really* independent, and that we really ARE getting safe stuff???

Julian - sorry re the St John's Wort It works for me on a Monday morning (as do ginseng pills).

My aunt on the other hand now only has 25-50% (it varies day to day) use of her kidneys; she took some kind of herbal remedy for something (I don't know the details) and it blew her kidneys - premanently.

However, if the herbal stuff could be tested and researched by an independent body like normal pharmas (allegedly) are, and then prescribed by a doctor, it might be safer in the long run.

After all, as I say, pharmas are out for profit; look at the way they've held HIV/AIDS drugs out of reach of Africa because they can't pay for them - that's the worst kind of extortion if you ask me...

 

Dr. Rath is well-known in Germany for his outrageous and unverifiable claims. I consider him a fraud. He makes millions off the hopeless and gullible, a despicable business if ever there was one.

Bumboy, "supplements"? A healthy diet will give your body everything it needs in vitamins, minerals etc., presents these ingredients in such a way that your body can actually make use of them, and costs a lot less.

 

You are side-lining the issue. Dr Rath is not the issue. The issue is whether adults have the right to supplement their diet. i do believe they have this right, and so do millions of others. The issue is whether the pharma industry is monopolizing health.

You should produce the evidence that suggests we get everything we need from our diet. You will not find this evidence. Is your diet made up totally of non-porocessed foods? Do you have diabetes or cancer? There is plenty of evidence to support the beneficial therapeutic effects of many nutritional supplements. Perhaps you need to wake up. Governments that can be lobbied to war for oil can also war to monopolize health. The pharma lobby is the 2nd most powerful loby after the defence industry. The fact remains that pharma companies are acting to remove competition for patented drugs and monopolize treatment. The fact is that some people are benefitting from supplementation. People are not dying from supplementation. Overdose or harm does not appear to be a real problem or concern with natural supplementation, wheras Pharma drugs are the 4th largest killer of human beings.

In Germany and France, the most commonly precribed herbal supplement is St John's Wort.

 

Dom, if I can come back on those two points, I think your positions are grossly simplistic, but they're typical of people who know nothing about the industry. I once worked for a pharma company (Sandoz, now Novartis), so I've seen what goes on in the inside. For a start, you must remember that, before any drug is released on to the market, you have to do clinical trials. That means that the companies must prove to government agencies that the drug really does do what it does. These are hard to get past - and the toughest of all is the US FDA. I have friends in the Basel industry (devout Christians by the way) who help design the experiments to make sure that the results are statistically representative of the population of sufferers. The whole process takes forever, fills rooms with documentation (literally) and costs a horrendous amount of money. When a drug is approved for an indication (a particular disease), it is as safe as modern science can make it. (And if you want that drug for a different indication, yes, you have to do it all again).

That's not to say that modern science can't get it wrong. Thalidomide is a case in point - it really was a wonder drug - but nobody had tried it on pregnant women. On anyone else, there were no side-effects and it was great. The company did a daft thing in burying its head in the sand for so long.

With regard to profits, of course they want to make a profit. Do you happen to know any modern company that runs as a charity? Would you be happy if your employer didn't make a profit? In addition, you have to bear in mind the mind-blowing costs of drug research. In spite of all the molecular modelling tools and so on, successful drug research retains a degree of serendipity- you're dealing with enormously complex natural systems, and there's no predicting what'll happen. So, if you synthesise 10,000 compounds, you'll be lucky to end up with 20 drug candidates. Then you have to eliminate those that cure the disease by killing the patient, that are impossible to make on a large scale, etc. and you end up with perhaps ten that are considered ready to enter the development process and progress to clinical trials. If six drugs come out of it all, you can pat yourself on the back and say how incredibly lucky you are.

This is why, in my business, drug patents are the only ones that can have their life extended (to 25 years) - by the time you've got your drug on the market, most of the patent life has gone (it takes about 12 years from go to whoa). This is the real reason that drug prices are high - if the companies didn't make profits to cover the costs, there wouldn't be any new drugs, period. It's a horrendously expensive business and there's no guarantee of success. It requires the most staggering facilities and expertise.

Having said that, the companies are not lily-white, but to call them extortioners is plain wrong. They want their profits, but, as I say, please tell me of a company that doesn't. The pharma companies attract more attention because they're in the area they are, where life and death issues are concerned. I agree that they were heavy-handed and they thoroughly deserved the egg on their faces they got in South Africa, when they tried to stop the Government overriding the patent rights. I don't think they'll do that again. In addition, I don't like the emphasis of some of them on "lifestyle" drugs (Viagra and the like), while nobody looks seriously at drugs for tropical diseases, because there's little money to be made there.

What's really needed is some sort of international agency that takes promising third world-relevant medicines that the companies don't wish to develop and develop them. But that'll need money too, because the same clinical trials regime awaits. And I don't see anyone rushing to do that. It's easy to lambast the pharma companies for villainy, profiteering, extortion, etc., but they're only operating in the market, just like everyone else. But that's only people wanting a soft target - it saves them thinking about the problem and how it can be solved.

 

The pharma industry does not seek to cure, it seeks to treat. Treatment and disease prolongment is a better business strategy.