3 ms·

Here's the deal: you have a report. You have no way of knowing if the information in the report is correct, or not. You may have paid $99 for something that's

by timr 13y ago

Here's the deal: you have a report. You have no way of knowing if the information in the report is correct, or not. You may have paid $99 for something that's completely fictional. You just don't know. Is that your "right"? Sure, to some extent. A sucker is born every minute, and if you desperately want to be one of them, the US Government is mostly content to let it happen. We'll even let companies do patently absurd things like sell you pills that are supposed to make your dingus larger. We just limit what they can say when they're selling them to you, to protect the most credulous among us. Like it or not, our society has decided that certain forms of charlatanism are so egregious that we act proactively to prevent them. Medicine is one area where we are strict, because our country has survived a rather nasty era where unfettered "medical innovation" was allowed to kill large numbers of people. I have a vintage Merck manual sitting on my desk, and it recommends such wonderful treatments as oral arsenic for hair loss (to be fair, you probably care a lot less about being bald when you're dead...) and vinegar (via injection!) as a cure for cancer. That's "medical innovation" without regulation to enforce safety and effectiveness, and I don't particularly want to go back to it. Maybe you do. The FDA is doing its job rationally here, it is well within its mandate, and as far as anyone who knows what they're talking about can tell (including the leaders of the company), 23andMe is just clearly in the wrong on this issue. So if you don't like the laws we've set up to protect consumers against medical malpractice, I guess that's your opinion, but it's obviously dumb to blame the FDA for doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing.

patrickaljord 13y ago
This is ridiculous, you take extreme examples to prove your point. So let's see, you can still read about all this and worse on the internet, do we still have people taking arsenic en masse to cure baldness? No. Because most people are responsible and giving them the freedom to do what they want with their body is more important than anything else. Plus, if someone is ignorant enough to drink arsenic to cure baldness, he'll probably find other ways to hurt himself anyway, FDA or no FDA. So let's go back to the FDA, is it so effective? Here is the FDA authorizing a drug that killed lots of people http://www.undergroundhealth.com/fda-approved-prescription-drugs-kill-hundreds-of-thousands-of-people-annually/ http://www.undergroundhealth.com/fda-approved-prescription-d... Also, the time the FDA takes to approve a good drug can take more than 10 years, how many people die because of this unseen consequence? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Food_and_Drug_Administration#Alleged_problems_in_the_drug_approval_process http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Food_and_Drug_... Not to forget its reluctance to approve drugs for political reasons (canabis). So let's see, many people die because of wrongly approved drugs and many die as it takes too long to approve good ones because of the FDA. Now let's imagine a world with no FDA, many people would still die, but at least they'd have the choice to do so on their own decision and not have to wait on a nanny state bureaucracy to tell them what's good or bad for them and many times wrongly so. Why not let people freely decide what they can do to their own body when not doing so still kills a lot of people too? Plus, allowing so would make it much faster to detect when a drug works or not and save way more lives. If you don't even own your own body, what do you own?
- timr 13y ago
  "do we still have people taking arsenic en masse to cure baldness? No." Yeah, we have things called "clinical trials" that pretty much put an end to the bad old days of patent medicine. Guess who enforces that stuff? The rest of your post is a straw-man. Does the FDA make mistakes? Sure. That doesn't invalidate the need for the agency. Is it your right to do stupid things with your body? See previous comment.
  - patrickaljord 13y ago
    >> "do we still have people taking arsenic en masse to cure baldness? No." > Yeah No, we don't. I said "en masse", that is to say, do we have a massive amount of people taking arsenic everyday to cure boldness? No we don't, and yet anyone can read about it on the web. > Does the FDA make mistakes? Sure. That doesn't invalidate the need for the agency. Yes it does, I've just explained that the FDA is responsible for more death than if we had no FDA while taking away people's freedom do cure themselves the way they want. > Is it your right to do stupid things with your body? See previous comment. Well, according to you, only if the FDA approves so, the same FDA responsible for countless deaths. No thanks.

by timr 13y ago

patrickaljord 13y ago

This is ridiculous, you take extreme examples to prove your point. So let's see, you can still read about all this and worse on the internet, do we still have people taking arsenic en masse to cure baldness? No. Because most people are responsible and giving them the freedom to do what they want with their body is more important than anything else. Plus, if someone is ignorant enough to drink arsenic to cure baldness, he'll probably find other ways to hurt himself anyway, FDA or no FDA. So let's go back to the FDA, is it so effective? Here is the FDA authorizing a drug that killed lots of people http://www.undergroundhealth.com/fda-approved-prescription-drugs-kill-hundreds-of-thousands-of-people-annually/ http://www.undergroundhealth.com/fda-approved-prescription-d... Also, the time the FDA takes to approve a good drug can take more than 10 years, how many people die because of this unseen consequence? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Food_and_Drug_Administration#Alleged_problems_in_the_drug_approval_process http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Food_and_Drug_... Not to forget its reluctance to approve drugs for political reasons (canabis). So let's see, many people die because of wrongly approved drugs and many die as it takes too long to approve good ones because of the FDA. Now let's imagine a world with no FDA, many people would still die, but at least they'd have the choice to do so on their own decision and not have to wait on a nanny state bureaucracy to tell them what's good or bad for them and many times wrongly so. Why not let people freely decide what they can do to their own body when not doing so still kills a lot of people too? Plus, allowing so would make it much faster to detect when a drug works or not and save way more lives. If you don't even own your own body, what do you own?

timr 13y ago
"do we still have people taking arsenic en masse to cure baldness? No." Yeah, we have things called "clinical trials" that pretty much put an end to the bad old days of patent medicine. Guess who enforces that stuff? The rest of your post is a straw-man. Does the FDA make mistakes? Sure. That doesn't invalidate the need for the agency. Is it your right to do stupid things with your body? See previous comment.
- patrickaljord 13y ago
  >> "do we still have people taking arsenic en masse to cure baldness? No." > Yeah No, we don't. I said "en masse", that is to say, do we have a massive amount of people taking arsenic everyday to cure boldness? No we don't, and yet anyone can read about it on the web. > Does the FDA make mistakes? Sure. That doesn't invalidate the need for the agency. Yes it does, I've just explained that the FDA is responsible for more death than if we had no FDA while taking away people's freedom do cure themselves the way they want. > Is it your right to do stupid things with your body? See previous comment. Well, according to you, only if the FDA approves so, the same FDA responsible for countless deaths. No thanks.