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I am definitely missing the point of allowing nonfunctional drugs to be sold and advertised as curing anything. What keeps me from selling magic molecule pills

I am definitely missing the point of allowing nonfunctional drugs to be sold and advertised as curing anything. What keeps me from selling magic molecule pills and advertising that they are approved for safety and in trials to cure cancer? And even if you disallow advertisements for drugs not yet proven effective, what's to stop my magic molecule pills from going viral and making me a whole lot of money on something I know is extremely unlikely to treat any disease, because I literally put a random inert molecule in there?

s1artibartfast 5y ago
The problem that this could address is the FDA is slow and has an all or nothing approach. This means: 1) Timing: There are people who suffer and die while products are held up in lengthy phase 3 approvals. 2) Human Impact: There are drugs& devices which are safe, but have weak efficacy data. For some like aducanumab, if they work, they could help millions of people today. This puts the FDA in a tough spot weighing a big potential benefit to society against things medicare costs for a low/no efficacy drug. Im personally not advocating for throwing open the gates to any snake oil. I think a reasonable proposal would be to require robust data on safety, a strong argument for why it should work, and require monitoring of efficacy after approval. If time tells that your magic pills dont work, they get pulled from the market. If time tells that they do work, you get your gold star The first link in this post explains it better than I can. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28620621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28620621