Washington: The United States government has decided to crack down on homoeopathic drugs and announced a new policy from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
The FTC in a statement has said that all homoeopathic drug makers must present reliable scientific evidence to prove that their product works if they want to sell them to American consumers.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had earlier decided that homoeopathic products could be sold over the counter (OTC) without going through FDA approval as long as they were labeled as homoeopathic and that the ingredients can be found in the ‘homoeopathic pharmacopeia’ — a database of homoeopathic compounds.
In a report from a November 2015 workshop on homoeopathic medicine and advertising, FTC has concluded that there was no convincing reasons not to hold homeopathic remedies to the same truth-in-advertising rules as for any other product making claims of health benefits, Forbes reported.
The FTC’s new policy states that “the case for efficacy is based solely on traditional homoeopathic theories and there are no valid studies using current scientific methods showing the product’s efficacy.” Since no such evidence exists, companies now must state clearly on their labeling that “there is no scientific evidence that the product works” and “the product’s claims are based only on theories of homoeopathy from the 1700s that are not accepted by most modern medical experts.”
