They're highly influenced by big pharma.
Everyone in tech knows how products get to market.
Once coding is done you have an alpha test, with friends and family checking the code. Then comes the beta test, where volunteers are allowed in. Finally comes what I call the “gamma test,” or the general market release.
For most of what we put into our bodies the process is pretty similar. Beta testing is the way we roll.
Few companies push cures through the full FDA approval process. If you’ll settle for sales, not just prescriptions, you call what you offer a supplement and bypass the government entirely.
Few object to that. My health food store might not have gotten through the 1980s without that kind of forebearance. But in the last decade all kinds of quack cures have used the supplement exception to make us all beta testers.
I have written before about one such substance, revasterol. Following its mention on Oprah by Dr. Oz Mehmet of RealAge, the doc’s face has been all over the Net pushing an anti-aging elixir made of acai berry, which is said to contain lots of the stuff.
It might be great. But wouldn’t you like to know first?
The latest supplement to hit public consciousness is Sensa, which claims to stimulate the sense of smell so you will eat less. (That’s Sensa “creator” Dr. Alan Hirsch at the top.) It’s not the only such product. A pen-based version called SlimScents is making similar claims.
Never mind that the only company in the field taking the pharmacology route, Compellis Pharmaceuticals, is going in the opposite direction, with a compound that actually makes things harder to smell.
As Richard Doty, who heads the smell and taste center at the University of Pennsylvania (go Quakers), put it to The New York Times, “more research needs to be done.” Amen to that.
As I noted at SmartPlanet recently, companies have been using loopholes in the law to push some really dangerous stuff on people. I asked last week, “How many more Zicams are out there?” and the more I learn the more urgent the question becomes.
Sensa may be the best thing since sliced cheese. It may be as benign as salt or MSG. The truth is I don’t know.
Are you happy being a beta tester? Is it OK that the FDA has to wake up and get its shoes on before even looking at what you put in your body, based on the “endorsement” of some guy in a white coat?
How big a scandal do we require before we start asking the question seriously?
