Quote:
Originally Posted by chezlaw
You've jumped from 'not proven to be effective to 'proven not to be effective'.
That removes the point completely.
I don't want to speak for Wookie, but my argument would be an analogy to Gresham's Law, or some varient of Akerlof's lemons problem. Suppose you have the FDA concerned *only* with whether a drug is harmful, and not whether it's effective. So now you're introducing two new groups of approved drugs (in addition to the current group that has been shown to likely be both safe and effective):
- Drugs that are not harmful and may provide real benefits.
- Drugs that are not harmful and will absolutely not provide any benefits (Wookie's sugar pills).
Assuming that the first group (the ones that might bring real benefits) costs more to develop (which they almost certainly would), then I would expect you're just going to see a race to the bottom where drugmakers simply manufacture sugar pills; if consumers can't distinguish between the two groups because there's no evidence on their efficacy, then they're not going to be willing to pay more for one group. Therefore, drugmakers end up only making the sugar pills. Bad drugs have crowded out good drugs; Akerlof's market has resulted in nothing but lemons.
So even though Wookie may have seemed to skip a couple of steps to get to his example, I actually think it's a natural endpoint to the system that you're suggesting.