Can the FDA Follow Basic Health Care Principles on Natural Agents for Compounding Pharmacies?

John Weeks

Can the FDA Follow Basic Health Care Principles on Natural Agents for Compounding Pharmacies? Two health care principles surfaced while listening to a webinar in which longtime integrative medicine attorney Alan Dumoff, JD, MSW, described the current status of the work of the American Association for Naturopathic Physicians (AANP) and the Integrative Medicine Consortium to protect natural agents that the US Food and Drug Administration is threatening to ban from compounding pharmacies.1 One is the Hippocratic principle familiar to all practitioners as "first do no harm." In the integrative health world, this is taken to its logical extension: When possible, use less-invasive modalities with fewer adverse effects. The second principle is a modern one worn on the forehead of every medical delivery organization that has been marketing itself for the last 25 years since it became commonplace for hospitals to engage in marketing: "patient-centered care." Each, according to Dumoff's presentation, might as well have been run over by a tractor given their abuse by the FDA's Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee (PCAC).

I am a subscriber to IMCJ and would like to read this article
I would like to purchase this article - $35.00
I would like to subscribe to IMCJ for $55.00 and obtain access to this article