From: hutch@hutch (Stephen Hutchison)
Subject: Re: FDA still at large  (long)
Keywords: FDA, unconstitutional illegal action,single-issue blindness
Organization: Intel Corp., Hillsboro, Oregon
Date: Sun, 26 Jul 92 22:30:39 GMT

In article <1992Jul26.185412.24583@klic.rain.com> keithl@klic.rain.com (Keith Lofstrom) writes:
(Carefully excising the part of my post where I say that I am against the
war-on-rights, and the part where I say that I want to see the people
who prey on others persecuted to the full extent of the law - and the
law extended where necessary to properly persecute them.)

>Hutch, it pains me greatly that so many people do so many stupid things.  Why,
>if I examined your life carefully, I could probably point out dozens of things
>*you* do that *I* consider stupid.
Yeah, and you stayed at Tek for a good four years longer than I would have
were I in your situation, which if I were being judgemental, I could say was
stupid, but that's really irrelevant to the point I was making.  Calling a
person's actions stupid is a waste of electricity.

>Now imagine me and a few dozen thugs
>come over to your place and forcibly prevent you from doing anything I
>consider stupid - and forcibly prevent you from calling for help - for your
>own good, of course!  After a week of that, you would be ready to kill. 

Actually, depending on what you were preventing, I might be doing so.

>You, and I, and Joe Lunchpail down the street, are all doing what we consider
>the smartest thing for ourselves and others.

Never met any truly neurotic people, have you?  For that matter, most of
the alcoholics I've met consider drinking to be not-smart.  They do it
anyway.  People don't generally let "smart" or "stupid" be a guide to
whether or not they do something.  They very seldom think about it that much.

>Those
>new ideas are incredibly costly - they must be winnowed from lots of bad ideas
>that cost the lives of thousands of fools.  But the good ideas are worth
>those lost lives.

Not really.  But the cost is inevitable.

>Linus Pauling has been fighting most of the medical establishment, and pushing
>the idea of high doses of vitamin C as a treatment for cancer, and as an aid
>to general health.

Scary.  As an aid to health, fine, but there's this small problem: the body
accustoms itself to the levels, and begins excreting it in extreme levels.
Since you cannot get that much C in any normal diet, you become dependant
on concentrated forms; be caught away from your concentrated form for a
week and you start to develop scurvy.  Great fun.

>Dr. Steve Harris, a buddy of mine working in Roy Walford's
>lab in UCLA, has been experimenting with longevity studies in rats at UCLA,
>testing the effects of various supplements (as well as caloric restriction).
>You know what?  Certain vitamins, taken far in excess of the RDA, can help
>you live longer.  The FDA response?  They are talking about making vitamins
>require a prescription.

Well, they have shown that they make rats live longer.  However, the
FDA actions is not a response to his studies.  They responded to directives
from the drug-paranoid administration based on the growing number of food
extracts and supplements being sold, untested, with claims based on very
shaky evidence from badly constructed studies (but eagerly proclaimed by
the live-forever couple, Durk-n-Sandy, in their book for the fearfully
aging yuppies, "Life Extension").  The L-tryptophan disaster, where one
japanese company distributed improperly manufactured L-T which turned out
to be extremely poisonous, caused an administrative directive from the
president to the FDA to investigate and put tighter controls on the sale
of things being hawked as "food additives" with claims for drug-like effects.

>Why is the FDA doing this?  They aren't the monsters that certain of my
>libertarian friends would have you believe.  The problem is that they are no
>more omniscient than you or I, and they have no way of telling what will
>be eventually learned about these things.

Yes, this is true.  They also get a larger budget if they can use the
administration's official violation of the search-and-siezure clause in
the constitution, to grab the assets of people doing things that look
suspicious.

>Since their charter is to prevent
>anything unconventional that might be harmful, they go after things that are
>unconventional - because they have no way of determining what will be harmful
>in the long run.

The charter of the FDA is not to go after "unconventional", it is to prevent
fraud in medicine (except for those few which were protected by "grandfather
clauses": homeopathy and chiropractic among them), and to ensure that what
gets sold as food, is actually nutritious and not harmful.

They developed some regulations for ensuring the first, which need to be
overhauled but are generally worthwhile.  They did the same for foods.
They don't officially care about "long term harm" unless there is some
evidence that there is some.  They aren't allowed to care about alcohol
or tobacco, by law.

>[Strawman, I mean, thought experiment, about evil clinic with political
 [ clout, and less evil clinic with a real cure rate omitted here...
>Now, who do you think the FDA will shut down?

Depends.  They generally shut down BOTH, if they're in the USA, based on
historical practice, but the political clout definitely has effect, and
what point are you trying to make?

>Now, imagine that it was 1880, with no restrictions on medical practice, and
>the folks at clinic A wanted the whole pie to themselves.  Would the clinic
>B fellows be able to resist the efforts of the clinic A fellows to establish
>a state licensed monopoly?  Well, in 1880, the clinic A guys were called
>Allopaths, and they did just that to their colleagues the Naturopaths,
>Homeopaths, Chiropractics, midwives, folk doctors, and others, driving those
>kinds of doctoring into the corners and denying them the benefits of 
>scientific improvement.  It would be a little like the government forcing us
>all to use DOS;  after 20 years of that, most of the other OS's would be in
>pretty sad shape.

Amusing - except, not really true.  The "folk doctors" you refer to were
generally snake-oil peddlers.  Homeopaths were shown scientifically to have
no support long ago, but they're still permitted to operate subject to the
oversight of their national accreditation organization, same as AMA doctors.
Same with chiropractic and naturopaths.  The lack of success is due to the
amazing failure to produce results that can be scientifically verified.
Alternatives like chinese traditional medicine, especially acupuncture,
have had more success.  Because they produce results, they have had better
success. 

Oh, as for the DOS analogy, I can only point to ADA.  Has anyone other
than Intel come up with a compiler that passes the qual suite?
(And that one being the compiler and tool suite for the i80960 MC)...

> [details of death of Eric Knapp due to cancer omitted]

Using rad-therapy instead of chemo and/or amputation was a bad call; most
oncologists should know better.  If Eric made the choice for rad therapy
instead of amputation, it was his choice, right?

>Hutch, I am sorry for your friend's mother.  I am also sorry that your friend,
>and you, were given such pitiful rhetorical training in school that you two
>couldn't talk your friend's mother out of foolishenss.

That's rather presumptious of you.  Keith, I've never met the woman.  Her
entire life, up to the last two years, she spent under the care of the
"alternative" medicine you've been defending.  Her daughter finally got
her to see an AMA doctor when some other problems were not being fixed
by the continual expensive treatmens she was getting from the "alternatives"
she was using.  She has had the cancer for at least six years.  It's too late,
and now she's trying to find a miracle cure.

>SHE IS GOING TO DIE.  *YOU* are going to DIE.  *I* am going to DIE.  The AMA 
>cannot prevent that.  The FDA cannot prevent that.  Whether they help or
>hurt is a judgement call, as there is ALWAYS data on both sides.

This is irrelevant.  The FDA would have stopped the fruitjuice fraud clinic
from operating if they had the ability to do so, but as you say, they're
in Mexico.  The parent corporation, however, is located in the USA.

>If the populace has become so irresponsible that they can't properly
>make those judgement calls any more, nothing is solved by taking a
>fraction of them and giving them decision making powers over the rest.
>Instead, you find out why the education process is turning out such
>irresponsible people, and slowly, painfully, and wisely remediate that.

Oh come on, Keith.  This is the "populace" which elected a B movie actor
who had not completed high school, to the office of President.  This is
the "populace" which considers Geraldo Rivera's "news" program to be
cutting, incisive, and informative.  There's no impetus for the people
who are running the country to make any of the changes you describe.
They have figured out how to get the people, as intelligent and well
informed as they might be individually, to behave like well trained
sheep en masse.

>Most laws are attempted shortcuts by people too lazy to use their freedom of
>speech to educate their neighbors, or too stupid to learn from them.

The "information inertia" is really amazing.  People take their data from
those sources which are easiest, and guess which shiny-fronted box is 
the easiest.  It's not easy to educate people who won't read.

>Freedom inspires martyrdom on the the part of those who love it.  You may
>not understand why others are willing to take arms and die if necessary to
>preserve the freedom to do things you dislike, but please remember that we
>are out there, and we can be pushed too far.

Actually, I DO understand that.  However, I think that there are places
where it is appropriate to limit peoples' actions, and when those actions
are harmful to others, it is very appropriate.  Medical fraud is harmful.

Hutch
Newsgroups: sci.med