In the past week I’ve received dozens of emails from friends and colleagues identifying the FDA as the enemy who is threatening our health freedom — freedom of access to alternative therapies and products of our choosing. The email contains a message from Rima E. Laibow, MD stating that: “The FDA is using legal maneuvering to end your access to natural health products… and natural health therapies of all sorts.” She states that this is being done through the FDA’s Guidance for Industry on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Products and Their Regulation by the Food and Drug Administration. She asks that you take action through her website using the following link: http://tinyurl.com/2u7ghc. There you can sign a message to the FDA.

I wonder how many people visited her Natural Solution Foundation’s website and signed their name to the message without reading the message and without ever reading the FDA document to which the message refers. How many were willing to take the word of the Natural Solutions Foundation at face value without ever investigating the issue themselves?

I am a passionate advocate of health freedom (freedom of access to products and therapies of our choice, whether they be conventional or alternative). I have reservations about the FDA making decisions about the usefulness and safety of many alternative therapies, and I don’t have much trust that a medication is safe because the FDA has approved it. At the same time, I don’t think the FDA is out to deprive us of all access to alternative therapies. Therefore I read the Guidance myself. (You can read the Guidance itself at this link: http://www.fda.gov/OHRMS/DOCKETS/98fr/06d-0480-gld0001.pdf.)

I couldn’t find justification for many of the Natural Solution Foundation’s statements in the FDA document. For example, they state that “their (the FDA) ploy is to declare the therapies are “Medicine” so any non-physician who uses them will be practicing medicine without a license.” I don’t see anything like that in the Guidance. People have jumped to all sorts of conclusions about the what the Guidance is saying and what the implications of it are that I simply can’t see there.

The other day a friend expressed her upset about what the FDA is supposedly doing — “no one will be able to do Reiki if they aren’t a doctor”. As complicated as the FDA Guidance is, it’s quite clear to me that it does not mean that. There is specific reference to bodywork practitioners who manipulate the bodies of their clients without use of equipment not being subject to the FDA’s jurisdiction. If bodywork is exempt, certainly Reiki, in which the practitioner doesn’t even manipulate the body, would be exempt. Having not read the Guidance herself, my friend had jumped to conclusions based on a message in an email containing someone else’s interpretation of the Guidance.

The point of my post is not to try to analyze the FDA Guidance or Laibow’s position. To do justice to that I’d have to do a lot of reading and study. What I want to focus on is my concern that the same bipartisanship that we see in national politics is being reflected in the realm of health politics. There’s a tendency in many of us (including myself) to want either alternative or conventional medicine to be all right or all wrong. This kind of thinking doesn’t allow us to work together to find the best solutions. These issues are very complex and not subject to simplistic solutions.

There is also a tendency to rely on the opinion of experts and authorities. What’s interesting is that even those of us who feel we’re liberated because we don’t follow the advice of a doctor blindly, are still willing to follow the advice of an alternative “expert”. We find a new authority and don’t even recognize that we are still not thinking for ourselves. The willingness to look into the complexities of an issue and form ones own opinions, as well as the willingness to live in the “grey area” where there are no simple solutions, isn’t easy. But I feel we need to develop this willingness to really progress.