This show is quickly becoming a wonderful voice for reason, transparency and common sense

And a Great Ending too...

Just me or is the audio on this all over the place?

Let's face it, a lot of people are lazy. Then again, we are kinda wired to be lazy, but jesus, more people complained about supplements being regulated than they did the Vietnam war?

Fixed that for you. And @shatterdrose, people love their snake oil.

So, yet again, the problem can be traced back to the insidious influence of lobbying. If only there was some way to prevent it...

John Oliver is wrong.

Yes, some supplements (say, the milk thistle found in Rockstar Energy Drink) are just snake oil. But other supplements have clinical effects, such as St. John's Wort (http://www.webmd.com/depression/guide/st-johns-wort) for minor depression and, arguably, glucosamine and chondroitin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_trials_on_glucosamine_and_chondroitin)

Here's the thing though - if the FDA regulates supplements in the same way they do drugs, the price of supplements would go through the roof. It costs 1.3 BILLION DOLLARS to get a new drug approved by the FDA. (http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2014/01/24/shocking-secrets-of-fda-clinical-trials-revealed/)

So the supplements market provides a very useful alternative, something that John Oliver simply doesn't understand. You can either pay ten bucks for a 300 pack of St. John's Wort, or you can pay ten times that amount for the FDA approved antidepressant, Zoloft.

The sad truth is that the FDA really does overregulate the drug market, which is one of the major reasons health care is so fucking expensive in this country. John Oliver lives in magical fairly land where regulating supplements would come with no cost, but in reality regulating it would just close down the only inexpensive drug system we have in the world.

Scientific studies do exist for supplements (I read through the studies while my wife was at UCSF Pharmacy School taking their mandatory alt med class), and if you do your research, you can distinguish the snake oil from the supplements that have real effects.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'nutritional, supplement, magic, pill, weight, loss, senate, hearing, FDA, june 22' to 'nutritional supplement, magic pill, weight loss, senate hearing, FDA, june 22' - edited by xxovercastxx

*controversy

Adding video to channels (Controversy) - requested by MrFisk.

Marketing wouldn't be a thing if everybody did their research.

I personally don't have a problem with the sale as I do have with the false claims. Where else can you get away with that? I think that is what Oliver is going on about.

No, he's not wrong.

It's pretty simple. Either your supplement does what it claims to or it doesn't. If it does, submit it for testing and approval.

There's no such thing as "alternative medicine". There is only that which has been proven to work (i.e. medicine) and that which has either not been proven to work or been proven not to work.

Besides, it is completely unreasonable to expect the average person to research the efficacy of supplements. Even among intelligent educated people (clearly a minority), most of them do not have time, let alone the ability to conduct this kind of research. That's why we have regulatory bodies. I wouldn't ask an epidemiologist to build a house and I wouldn't ask an architect about the efficacy of drugs.

As for St Johns Wort, the answer is simple. If it works, get it approved. The solution is not "hey, this one thing works! Let's open the floodgates to every supplement!"

@ShakaUVM

By that logic, what would make sense is a lower standard of oversight, not none. Scientific studies are not a realistic source of guidance unless you are an expert in the field. Regulatory agencies such as the FDA, should and do exist for the purpose of informing the average consumer. If they are not working they need to be fixed, not circumvented.

If both Zoloft and Wort have discernible and scientifically significant benefits against depression, then medical decisions shouldn't be made by a seemingly arbitrary price classification into pharmaceuticals or alternative supplements.

The problem is, as with any multi billion dollar industry, existing players entrench the status quo. I have no doubt that to some extent existing pharmaceuticals companies benefit from the high barriers to entry the FDA has imposed in being able to deter competition from new starts.

Similarly, they would fight tooth and nail any new and uncertain supplement oversight because of the potential impact on their existing lines of revenue. But purely relying on merit, these are all terrible justifications.

Thalidomide...

/thread

Not true, at least not the primary reason.

The reason they're high is because pharmaceutical companies can get away with charging high prices and reaping high margins, because of their strong competitive position, margins some 50% higher in the US than the EU.

Source

See page 12 - Pre R&D margins are 65% in the US to 43% in the EU.

A big reason for this is the lack of a universal public option, only Medicare exists for the elderly, Medicaid for the poor. With a universal public option like in most developed countries, the monopsony buying power of the government for a much larger part of the population would force down margins.

Yep, this is a big issue in the current Trans Pacific Partnership trade talks between NZ and the US (among others). The NZ drug buying agency Pharmac gets really good bulk prices. The pharmaceutical industry, of course, hates this and the USA are pushing to have this abolished. Luckily that would be political suicide in NZ.

Umm, I'm not sure how your response is relevant to my comment...

Thalidomide was a drug given to pregnant women for nausea iirc which caused horrible defects in children. It was a classic case of a drug that was not regulated properly and should never been allowed on the market.

The reason why drugs undergo testing is because sometimes the side effects are far worse than any benefit they might provide. ShakaUVM was going on about deregulation, but if he'd watched the vid he would have seen the segment on a homeopathic remedy (ie. unregulated) which caused deaths and severe reactions. Perhaps if there was regulation, those people wouldn't be dead...

*promote

Promoting this video back to the front page; last published Monday, June 23rd, 2014 12:44am PDT - promote requested by JiggaJonson.

Ah right, misunderstood then.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

Sift of the week!

So, this is a major misconception by the public about where the money actually goes when drugs are developed. Read the link you have there, but with a more realistic eye about where the money is going. Drugs are SUPER expensive, but only because they're super expensive to discover. 'Drug discovery' is a tremendously difficult thing, to the point where it is the wetdream of a professional drug discoverer in the pharma world to discover 1 drug in their 30+ year career. During that time, the team of pharma researchers all have to be paid for their PhD level of expertise, and the human cost in developed countries is quite expensive! If there are 1000 people in one pharma company, and each person makes ~70+ thousand, and benefits cost another 100+ thousand per person each year, then the human cost alone in that rough exercise accounts for 170 million yearly for just 1000 people, and can touch the billion dollar figure per year for very large companies. That is where the money is going in that 1.3 billion dollar figure.

The major problem lies in developing a substance that actually does something, and you know exactly what that something is, including all side effects. To get a statistically valid clinical trial is actually a rather hard thing to do; a poorly designed clinical trial can prove whatever you want it to. Considering your St. John's wort example, the most costly 'drug discovery' component is already finished, it would just need to go through clinical trials as a drug for antidepression. The body of evidence in place may already serve for early phase clinical trials, and it may just need to go through a couple of more trials to prove its efficacy (and determine side effects). It would cost some money, but it would NOT be so prohibitively expensive as starting from complete scratch.

Considering this, the idea that it's 'unfair' to make the supplements world actually prove their product does what it is promised to do (or at the very least, not be harmful) is a bit odd. Quackery is illegal for moral reasons, and hard to argue that what the supplements world is doing is not quackery; particularly with the Dr. Oz zeal, false promises are being sold millions of bottles at a time. It is in the public's interest to get this stuff tested and approved!

Update on Supplements: Healthcare Triage News has been added as a related post - related requested by ChaosEngine on that post.