Three of the nation's leading dietary supplement trade associations have submitted a letter to the Food and Drug Administration concerning a recent ruling by the Utah District Court on the sale of low-dose ephedra products. The letter, signed by the American Herbal Products Association, the Council for Responsible Nutrition and the National Nutritional Foods Association, was sent to acting FDA Commission Lester Crawford on May 17, 2005, and urges the FDA to address a number of "uncertainties" raised by the ruling.
On Apr. 13, 2005, the United States District Court for the District of Utah ruled in the case of Nutraceutical Corp. v. Crawford that the FDA had failed to meet the burden of proof that a dosage of 10 milligrams per day or less of ephedrine alkaloids poses an "unreasonable risk of illness of injury." The court also ruled that the FDA's use of a risk-benefit analysis to determine what constituted an unreasonable risk of supplements containing ephedrine alkaloids was "improper."
The full text of the ephedra letter can be accessed at www.ahpa.org/05_0517_Crawford.pdf.
Fertility acupuncture sometimes gets presented as a narrow protocol: a handful of reproductive points applied uniformly across patients. What this case reinforced for me: The most powerful work happens when we read the whole picture. The hormone data, the constitutional tendency, the sleep, the digestion, and the menstrual pattern, so we can treat the environment the ovaries live inside.
Mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS) affects more than 15% of the U.S. population but evades most practitioners’ radar. Just five years ago, it wasn’t even on my radar, despite already having 20 years of experience as a clinician at that time. The more I dug (similar to leaky gut and post-COVID syndrome), the more I found my patients were suffering from this disorder.
The motivation behind our practice of medicine is important, impacting not just our experience but also the experiences of those we treat. It is perhaps for this reason that the aspiration to help not just some, but all beings heal, has historically been an important part of the medical tradition. To explain this, we need to consider how medicine is interwoven with other social domains.