> The director of the Bureau of Chemistry (and thus the first head of the FDA), Harvey Wiley, felt very strongly about the dangers of chemical additives being put into our foods and in 1905, began a series of tests where he gave young healthy government volunteers (e.g., those most resistant to chronic poisoning) higher doses of the additives commonly being used in foods and was able to demonstrate the recipients gradually became ill.

Almost a century ago, the 1929 book by the first FDA leader, https://archive.org/details/historyofacrimeagainstthefoodlaw...

  The story of the fight which has been waged for the protection of the public against adulterated and unfit foodstuffs is not a pleasant one. Politics has often played a larger part than a consideration of the welfare of the public. While some adulterations have only a commercial and not a public health interest, none the less the people should be protected against them.

What some people think the FDA is doing:

   Suppressing natural therapies
   Protecting the pharma industry

   Preventing hustlers from peddling false hope (at best ineffective, at worst harmful) to less educated people in dire straits

It's 'Fly by night companies are able to push bullshit onto unsuspecting consumers... again.'

Seems like this was revived via the second-chance system. I noticed it on the front page (1-30) this morning, but when I looked ~two hours later it was #447.

I've sorta followed this doctor's posts for a while. He has some good insights on the deterioration of the medical profession, and its capture by big business. I particularly appreciated his post on the deterioration of the competency of surgeons.

A lot of the comments below seem to not want to acknowledge that the dissidents against the status quo might be more correct in their philosophy for making the most of our lives.

Is it there but I am missing it? The author is "A Mid Western Doctor". Is this Joseph Mercola?

> Unfortunately, this law backfired, as the FDA created an impossible to reach standard of efficacy that it selectively enforced to protect the pharmaceutical industry and simultaneously began utilizing increasingly brazen (and illegal) police tactics against anyone promoting effective natural therapies.

> Because of this, many life-changing medical therapies (discussed throughout this article) were blacklisted by the FDA and faded into obscurity.

This is where I decided to stop reading, any piece of writing making a claim like this and not immediately listing at least one example is going to be a load of horseshit that is full of lies.

Jesus Christ, this blog is absolute trash, peddling a massive number of conspiracy theories, from vaccines causing autism to FDA doing massive coverups. Even going as far as to blame the Biden administration for things going on during the COVID vaccine period (when Trump was in power).

Honestly, just _fuck_ off with this nonsense. "I have a treasure trove of data that shows vaccines cause autism, and it can be verified. But I won't release it, but trust me."

I'm sorry the world isn't more interesting and there's no shadow government in place pulling the strings. The simple fact is people have always been autistic, and just went undiagnosed. I could even see arguments for it being less apparent when those children didn't have the comfort of the Internet to avoid developing their social skills etc.

/Rant.

We changed the inflammatory title to something more neutral, in keeping with the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

If anyone can think of a better title (i.e. more accurate and neutral, preferably using representative language from the article), we can change it again.

So, I won't talk about the vaccine part much, just to say those people don't understand autism at all, it isn't a sickness, just a different way of seeing/reacting to the world. One that need coping strategies early on. Well. I wasn't vaccinated until 6 (after almost dying from the whooping cough. Whooping cough is also my first and only childhood memory, and at least my adelphity got vaccinated after that). I am also the only autistic person of my whole family (25+ cousins, all vaccinated, my mother is the only one who didn't follow a medical career at first), so I guess I'm really unlucky.

I wanted to talk about DMSO. Shoot.

DMSO is a great molecule, but it has side-effects. It will give you gastric reflux (to my understanding this is pretty systematic), which will trash your oesophagus if you take it long term (my mother just got operated for this reason). My mother found out she was allergic to NSAIDs (it triggers her manic bipolarity), she take DMSO since like 2012 for everything, and just stopped taking it recently. She say she didn't noticed it before, but it was a bit like being under weed, albeit less strong: small memory gaps, weird concentration pattern (plus gastric reflux).

I have no doubt DMSO is better than the opioids it seems half of USians are prescribed (it's really rare to be given something stronger than NSAIDs here, even corticoids are rare, so it really seems like an exaggeration).

Please don't use it with children, I'm not anti-weed but I think we should avoid giving drugs that affect neurons until most of the brain is formed. If they're too young to drink, they're to young for DMSO.

I'm saying that because it's one of the only effective drug from the non-mainstream pharmacy, and when compared to the usual placebo, works really well, so it has a tendency to be idolised in groups with this minority habitus. Avoid giving it to children.

This article is just a bunch of unsubstantiated claims made by a crackpot.

I'm just here to comment that thw article really is a facinating history of the fda. Worth the read if the FDA is relevant to you for better or worse.