The World Chiropractic Alliance Americans have a mania for finding creative uses for everyday products. Experts appear on talk shows teaching audiences how to remove stains with soda pop.
Magazines run articles on making furniture from discarded tires.
Being able to use a product in a wide variety of ways, including many for which it was never originally intended, is a hallmark of ingenuity and innovation. A drug might be licensed for use as a way to control high blood pressure, for instance, after an FDA panel reviews all the pertinent research findings about it. Doctors, however, can prescribe that drug to treat a completely different health problem, even though the FDA has never licensed it for that purpose. Their decisions might be based on nothing more than a single report in a research journal, a suggestion from a colleague, or a newspaper article. Using drugs for off-label purposes has become so common that it is estimated that as many as half of all prescriptions are used as to treat ailments for which the drug was never properly tested or licensed.