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[av_heading heading=’PEOPLE POWWOW | ‘No approved therapeutic claim’’ tag=’h3′ style=’blockquote modern-quote’ size=” subheading_active=’subheading_below’ subheading_size=’15’ padding=’10’ color=” custom_font=”]
BY HERBERT VEGO
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Thursday, March 23, 2017
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MY FRIEND Cecille Contreras is an engineer who gave up her office work at the Department of Public Works and Highways in order to sell food supplements with the “no approved therapeutic claim” caveat. There are many other networkers like her who thrive in selling similar products and in recruiting “downlines”.
If they have no medicinal value, why do people patronize them as alternative medicine? Since I can vouch for their efficacy based on personal experience, others must have also disproved the “no approved therapeutic” label stamped on products okayed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as just food supplement.
We have heard victims of dengue swear having recovered after drinking boiled tawatawa leaves.
“I cannot recommend that,” a local doctor once said on cable TV. “No study proving its capacity to replenish blood platelets in dengue patients has been done.”
If so, then why has the FDA not initiated a study?
It must be because no pharmaceutical manufacturer has applied for tawatawa’s approval. Let us bear in mind that had a local company not submitted lagundi for DFA study and approval as cough medicine, it might have remained just a “food supplement”.
Malunggay in capsule form, reputedly anti-diabetes, has remained just a “food supplement” because it has not passed through FDA’s “due process.”
There was a time when I asked a distributor of an alleged “immune system booster” (a bottled juice concoction) why his product is still labeled “no approved therapeutic claim.” Had he not sought FDA approval?
“Our company tried,” he lamented, “but we would have to shoulder the high cost of expensive and extensive laboratory tests and experiments to prove its medicinal value. We can’t afford that.”
In other words, only big multinational medicine producers can afford that. But as to whether an approved medicine can fulfill its “mission,” that always remains to be seen on case-to-case basis. Once, a cardiologist prescribed to me an expensive FDA-approved anti-cholesterol “statin” tablet. Within a few days of taking the drug, however, I could hardly flex my arms due to excruciating muscle pains.
There are doctors though who recommend raw herbal products – such as garlic, akapulko, ampalaya, guava and lagundi – that have already been pronounced “medicinal” by the Department of Health. One of them is Dr. Jaime Galvez Tan, who used to be secretary of said department. In his lectures, Dr. Galvez Tan often quotes the Greek father of medicine, Hippocrates (460-357 BC): “Let your food be your medicine.”
Hippocrates as a physician prescribed natural remedies to prevent and treat diseases. He might have heard about herbal practitioners who had preceded him. Despite the primitive means of transportation and communications during his time, herbal medicine as practiced in China for centuries had already gained global patronage. Today, such originally doubtful practices as acupuncture and reflexology remain part and parcel of modern Chinese medicine.
Today, we all know that vegetables and fruits strengthen the body’s built-in immune system, giving it the capacity to fight disease-causing bacteria and virus.
No doubt, if a law could be passed requiring the FDA to exempt formulators of herbal medicine from spending too much for its approval, the locally-produced malunggay capsule would lose nothing but the label “no approved therapeutic claim.” (hvego@yahoo.com/PN)
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