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A critical history of the FDA

How the FDA habitually buries life-changing natural medicines and relentlessly props up unsafe and ineffective pharmaceuticals

In my eyes, the most important thing to understand about this dynamic is that it typically takes an incredible amount of work to reach the functional compromise that’s eventually settled upon, so if the existing process is scrapped (e.g. because people who are polarized on the issue can only see it from their side’s perspective) what follows (e.g., a complete lack of police enforcement in high crime areas) is often much worse than what preceded it. But the agency, a bureaucratic waif that is responsible for overseeing a staggering $200 billion worth of products yearly, is not only whipsawed by the public controversy, it is so demoralized that a number of its top positions long go unfilled, so burdened that it cannot keep up with the explosion of consumer goods and so battered by lawsuits and outside pressures that its power to make its decisions stick is sometimes undermined. In turn, once DMSO discovered in the early 1960s, it spread across the country like wildfire as patients immediately saw it treat a variety of debilitating conditions (e.g., chronic pain or severe arthritis), and researchers realized that it represented a new therapeutic principle that would completely transform medicine.

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