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Posted 1/25/2012 12:49 AM (GMT 0)

http://www.anh-usa.org/no-science-for-you/

Congress wants to limit your access to research—even though your tax dollars paid for it. If this bill passes, you’ll learn only what mainstream medicine wishes you to know.

"...This is about access to peer-reviewed scientific information—research that we pay for with our tax money. If this bill passes, Americans who want to read the results of federally funded research will have to buy access to each journal article individually—at a cost of $15 or $30 apiece. In other words, as the New York Times recently noted, taxpayers who already paid for the research would have to pay again to read the results.

Access to peer-reviewed scientific research is essential if you are to make informed choices regarding your family’s health—especially if you choose complementary and alternative medicine. Good research will let us choose wisely when it comes to questions of treatment modalities, vaccines, diet, nutrition, and medicine. Right now, supplement companies aren’t even allowed to tell you about the science behind their products, so we must get the scientific information directly from the source..."

Posted 1/25/2012 1:11 PM (GMT 0)
Thanks for posting this.
Followed instructions at site and sent e-mail to 2 MA state senators.
Posted 1/25/2012 3:37 PM (GMT 0)

Be very careful of this inflammatory and misleading b*llcr*p!

I agree the current law regarding "nutrient" and "food" and the FDA is flawed - mostly because of monied interests lobbying language into legislation back in 1994, but:

1) this legislation is not the fix

2) these people are not your friends or even interested in freedom or fairness.

3) this legislation is not about your health, or your freedom, but about MONEY!

Just look at the language in InSoFla's post and link. It is more inflammatory than informative, and it is full of hyperbole. Points are distorted or overstated or red-herrings like taxes or "publishing models" are waived around frantically. - The 1st step to getting informed on any issue should be to steer clear of folks who sound like salesman high on meth.

  • What is covered by "nutrient" in the current law needs to be much more carefully defined so that it excludes alot of non-essential (or even non-food) concentrations, concoctions, and chemicals that currently escape regulation as "natural supplements". After that, regulations about true nutrients and health claims might be relaxed a bit.
  • The burden of proof regarding a substantial and sufficient peer-reviewed scientific basis for all health and medicinal claims needs to remain with the maker of the claim, and not shifted to the FDA or other regulator - as this legislation seeks to do.
  •  
  • Let us not address existing FDA regulation problems (caused by corporate profits, big money lobbying, and underfunded bureaucracies)  by creating an even bigger mess where all kinds of players can make all kinds of claims about all kinds of foods and supplements. Far from freedom, we will have chaos - and you can bet some greedy fool will enter that fray to exploit the public.

 

Get educated. For a more critical and balanced review of the issues, try: http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2011/04/free_speech_about_science_act_2011_hr1364.php

 "What supporters of the FSAS Act of 2011 are doing ... they are trying to take away barriers to misinforming potential customers, exaggerating the potential benefits of their supplements while downplaying potential risks, all in the name of making a sale. ... this law really does appear to have very little to do with freedom of speech. Rather, its purpose appears to be to neuter the FDA with respect to claims by food and supplement manufacturers to treat diseases. Remember, under the DSHEA, supplements are considered more akin to food than medicine. In other words, for purposes of the FSAS Act, cherries, walnuts, and Cheerios function as a Trojan horse that, once brought into the protected walls of the FDA through H.R. 1364 (if made law), would soon disgorge its contents of all manner of supplement manufacturers making direct health claims to treat and cure disease based on the flimsiest of 'legitimate medical evidence.' "

There are problems. Changes are needed. BUT inflamed hyperbole from quacks wanting to make a quick buck is not a good start on a balanced and level headed examination of the issue. ... and running off to make laws, or change laws, or even write congressmen, based only on the kind of misleading drivel in InSoFla's link is NOT THE WAY TO GO!

Posted 1/26/2012 1:14 AM (GMT 0)

DbwithUC said...
There are problems. Changes are needed. BUT inflamed hyperbole from quacks wanting to make a quick buck is not a good start on a balanced and level headed examination of the issue. ... and running off to make laws, or change laws, or even write congressmen, based only on the kind of misleading drivel in InSoFla's link is NOT THE WAY TO GO!


This issue is complicated and confusing. But I do know that the above statement seems to be inflamed hyperbole complaining about inflamed hyperbole. I found the following link in the NY Times opinion page that seems clear and reasonable.

www.nytimes.com/2012/01/11/opinion/research-bought-then-paid-for.html?_r=1
Rather than rolling back public access, Congress should move to enshrine a simple principle in United States law: if taxpayers paid for it, they own it. This is already the case for scientific papers published by researchers at the N.I.H. campus in Bethesda, Md., whose work, as government employees, has been explicitly excluded from copyright protection since 1976. It would be easy to extend this coverage to all works funded by the federal government...

Researchers should cut off commercial journals’ supply of papers by publishing exclusively in one of the many “open-access” journals that are perfectly capable of managing peer review (like those published by the Public Library of Science, which I co-founded). Libraries should cut off their supply of money by canceling subscriptions. And most important, the N.I.H., universities and other public and private agencies that sponsor academic research should make it clear that fulfilling their mission requires that their researchers’ scholarly output be freely available to the public at the moment of publication.

These steps would not only accomplish an important public good — unlimited access to the latest scientific and medical findings — but they would also send a powerful sign of gratitude to the taxpayers, on whose continued support our research depends.
Posted 1/26/2012 3:13 AM (GMT 0)
For the record, no researcher I know supports this.

We get all of our information from these journal articles. Why the hell would we want to pay $15/article when we read about 30/month?

Insofla, most supplement companies do not 'tell you about the science behind their product' because there usually ISN'T any.
Posted 1/26/2012 11:20 AM (GMT 0)
I agree with DBwithUC and Malkavian.
Supplements do not have the same requirements as drugs. Supplements (thanks to the supplement industry/their lobbying group) do not have to be rigorously tested in clinical trials and can advertise whatever they want as long as they don't directly say it cures or treats a disease. Thus, there is often no research for supplements; if there is, it's typically not a strong study (i.e. small sample sizes, no control groups, etc.). It seems that this bill would give supplement industry even more freedom to advertise their products (thus, more money).

It seems that we often think "natural" treatments are better because we make out Big Pharma/doctors to be only concerned about profit; we don't consider that the supplement industry is out to make a profit as well.
Posted 1/26/2012 1:44 PM (GMT 0)
most supplement companies do not 'tell you about the science behind their product' because there usually ISN'T any.

Here are the results of a sample of randomized controlled trials (RCT) determining the efficacy or effectiveness of some natural supplements. Published by NIH in PubMed.gov:

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10022641
CONCLUSIONS:
Plantago ovata seeds (psyllium seed dietary fiber) might be as effective as mesalamine to maintain remission in ulcerative colitis.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19878610
Curcumin suppresses p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase activation, reduces IL-1beta and matrix metalloproteinase-3 and enhances IL-10 in the mucosa of children and adults with inflammatory bowel disease. We conclude that curcumin, a naturally occurring food substance with no known human toxicity, holds promise as a novel therapy in IBD.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11355324
Oral therapy with the Boswellia extract or AKBA significantly reduces macroscopic and microcirculatory inflammatory features normally associated with indomethacin administration, indicating that the anti-inflammatory actions of the Boswellia extract in IBD may be due in part to boswellic acids such as AKBA.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22085500
current evidence suggests that improving vitamin D status and/or using vitamin D receptor agonists may be useful in MS and IBD
Posted 1/26/2012 1:49 PM (GMT 0)
BabeintheWoods,

Thank you :-) .

Posted 1/26/2012 3:15 PM (GMT 0)
Some things to keep in mind:
-Just because one clinical trial shows a positive effect doesn't mean that there is truly a positive effect--clinical trials need to be repeated to determine efficacy.
-Just because there is a positive effect in mice or rats doesn't mean that there will be a positive effect in humans--clinical trails need to be done in humans.
-Although one would think that all supplements of the same name are the same thing, they may not be. For example, bosweilla tested in a clinical trial in Germany could be different than bosweilla manufactured in the US; sometimes different manufacturers add different things (I think Dr. Oz did a segment on this).

I think only vitamin D and curcumin have been studied repeatedly in IBD patients.

Bottom line: we need to be skeptical of the standard medical community AND the alternative medicine community.
Posted 1/26/2012 4:29 PM (GMT 0)
Thanks, BabeintheWoods for the science-

I agree that we need to be skeptical of both communities, especially (IMO) the standard medical community who theoretically does all the testing and receives FDA approval before unleashing drugs on the American public.

Have you noticed the ever-increasing number of lawyer-driven ads rounding up groups of people (who have taken FDA-approved drugs) for class-action suits against drug companies ?

IN MY OPINION much of the "testing" is being done after the drugs are released.
Posted 1/26/2012 8:40 PM (GMT 0)
Thanks to InSoFla for sharing this information. Let's not kill the messenger.

Many of us are focused on alternate cures for what ails us and want as much information as possible regarding drugs, supplements, etc. I'm pretty sure that most people participating in this forum are capable of making an educated decision when it comes to their own health and quality of life.

ItsAlwaysSomething is dead-on about drug tests and who are the real test subjects. The FDA relies on companies to test their own products and share whether or not there are problems. Isn't the honor system a wonderful thing? When I hear drugs being flogged on television the list of potential side effects is enough to steer me clear of them (thoughts of suicide, diarrhea, constipation, erections lasting over 4 hours...). I haven't encountered or heard of any similar issues from the use of natural substances taken in moderation.
Posted 1/27/2012 12:18 AM (GMT 0)
There's something we say in research regarding non-human models of disease: Mice lie, and monkeys exaggerate. It's hard to say if something's really effective without proper clinical trials (high numbers, randomized samples, double blind).

Here are the flaws I've found in your articles so far (other than the fact that they're not full-text so you can't actually see the results or statistics):

Article one was open label. Trials should be double blind to prevent placebo effect.

Article two is cell culture only and does not replicate the complexities in a biological system. It looks promising, but they're delivering it right into an in vitro system, and at what dose? Can we mimic those doses in vivo in humans? Do they reach the proper cells? Looks promising but there needs to be an established dosing system in humans to make sure it's hitting the right targets.

Article 3-Let's not get into my opinions on chemically-induced models of colitis. Some aspects are similar but it's like swallowing bleach and saying you have a model for gastric ulcers. They're only good if you just want an acute inflammation model. Also they look at leukocytes, rather than lymphocytes, as a marker, which would be important in tissue injury but not autoimmune colitis. Remember that in science, significant means something differerent than in layspeak. It means 'not due to chance' rather than 'a large change'. Overall, It looks okayish as an anti-inflammatory in conjunction with traditional therapies, but doesn't appear effective enough for use on its own. I wish I could see the pathology scores but full text is not working.

Article 4: A review article, which again I cannot access the full-text version. Seems to be purely speculative from the abstract.

"IN MY OPINION much of the "testing" is being done after the drugs are released."

Well, they're not going to catch super rare side effects in a test group of, say, one thousand. And you can't do long-term effect studies very quickly (which is where most of the recalls come from). Plus animals do not react the same way humans do-that's why thalomide was approved for pregnant women to use at one point. It causes horrible birth defects in humans, but the rats they were testing? Not so much.

"I haven't encountered or heard of any similar issues from the use of natural substances taken in moderation."

Kavu kavu causes liver damage. The tea is used as a natural sleep aid. Helmiths used to treat asthma and CD can cause allergic reactions. I know several 'natural' therapies for IBD (mostly colon cleanses) actually cause irritation and worsen disease. And let's not forget: hemlock, nightshade,botulism toxins, and tetrodotoxins are all 'natural'.
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