United States Food and Drug Administration Proposes to Drop the Effectiveness Test for Alzheimer's Drugs

So many new drugs on the market today are either ineffective or causing serious side effects. Now, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration are planning to loosen guidelines for approving new drugs to treat Alzheimer’s. Their effectiveness would be studied only after they are placed on the market. This opens the door for increasingly huge profits for pharmaceutical companies, taking advantage of the well-being of millions of persons suffering from this terrible disease. 

FDA Proposes to Drop the Effectiveness Test for Alzheimer’s Drugs
Alliance for Natural Health, 26 March 2013

OK. If they do, how about dropping the effectiveness test for food or supplements used to treat Alzheimer’s? Action Alert!

The US Food and Drug Administration was originally charged only with ensuring the safety of foods and drugs. But in 1962, Congress passed the Kefauver-Harris Amendment, also called the Drug Efficacy Amendment. It put the FDA in charge of also ensuring the effectiveness of the drugs they approve—a task the agency has never shown itself qualified to handle. It also caused the cost of approval to soar because of the requirement to prove effectiveness with double-blind random-controlled trials (RCTs). This in effect created the “Catch 22” we talk about so often, the fact that only drug companies with synthetic patented medicines can afford to pay as much as $1 billion for approval. This in turn makes the agency hostile to natural (and therefore unpatentable) medicines.
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