Supplements ARE Safe

I always get riled when I see a report in the media attacking supplements because some poorly designed government "study" came to a (pre-planned) conclusion that supplements are bad.

I also get riled when I read that a health care provider who uses a formulary mostly based on the use of plants, says that there are no studies, when thousands do exist, about the efficacy of herbs or supplements.  At the same time the FDA faces daily the problem of poorly studied pharmaceuticals that kill hundreds of thousands of people every year.

One attacking tome appeared recently in Scientific American, and yet at the very same time one providing evidence of effectiveness says -

"Decades ago, when Linus Pauling and Abram Hoffer first proposed mega-dose vitamin therapy as a serious treatment, mainstream medicine, aided by the press, promptly discredited this as quackery.  To this day, the media faithfully bombards us with the message that vitamins and minerals are useless, harmful or even killing us.(1-6)  When one considers the lowly vitamin pill as an economic rival to drugs, and the dependence of the media on drug company advertising, the motivation to discredit mega-dose vitamins becomes all too obvious.  Seemingly oblivious to this negative message, physicians quietly go about their business using megadose vitamin therapy in the intensive care unit with considerable success.  Recent reports of this have been appearing in medical journals, finally vindicating Linus Pauling and Abram Hoffer as yes, of course, they were right all along.(7-9)"

Problems with Big PhRMA are rampant, have been reported for years, and few changes happen. 

"There are not many wonder drugs still to be discovered, and new pharmaceutical developments are usually more about improving quality of life than saving lives. Often the biomedical companies' latest product is just the same old pill in a new package, so they need to spend billions of dollars on marketing, advertising and lobbying to ensure sales". Read complete article

With all the research that exists about herbs one wonders what are government employees are doing with foolish spending of taxpayer money.  And perhaps there is a reason why Orthomolecular Medicine isn't indexed in PubMed.