Tom Harkin Leaving the Senate

You've probably heard that Tom Harkin has announced that he will not be running for reelection to the Senate in 2014. 

You may think of him as a reliably liberal and pro-union voice in the Senate, and you'd be right. What you might be less aware of is that he's also one of the best friends of quacks, health scammers, and the antiscientific mindset in Congress.

He was one of the main sponsors of the law that in 1994 removed all regulation for dietary supplements sold across the country.  Among other things, what this law does is allow manufacturers to avoid almost all regulation and testing for their products while using code words to pretend that they will cure health conditions (e.g. "promotes normal cholesterol levels", "slow down the doubling time of your PSA (male prostate) levels when cancer is present"). 

Does this make a difference to people? Well, when a dietary supplement called ephedra was killing people that would seem to be kind of important, wouldn't it?

 But that's not all. Harkin was also behind a measure to force the federal government to spend money on the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.  In 1992 Harkin slipped a line in the report accompanying the NIH appropriations bill that created the NIH Office of Alternative Medicine with $1 million in seed money. (Bonus question: What do they call alternative medicine that works? A: Medicine.)

And in 2009 Harkin was able to slip a provision into the Affordable Care Act allowing for "alternative practitioners to be  treated as health care workers. This despite the fact that the claims of "therapeutic touch" have been soundly disproven and exposed as fraudulent.

 I kind of like Tom Harkin, but I won't miss Senator Woo.

It was inevitable, right?

I remember way back to the late 1980's, maybe the early 1990's, when I started seeing these petitions at my local health food store calling on Congress to pass legislation exempting dietary supplements from federal regulation. It had a weird list of sponsors, from Orin Hatch to our own Pat Leahy, and including Tom Harkin, who is one of the best friends of quacks, health scammers, and the antiscientific mindset in Congress.

I never signed the petition. We didn't have blogs back then, but I told everyone who would listen about how dangerous I thought the idea was, and experiences like the way a dietary supplement called ephedra killed people showed that I was right.

 Now there's a new study on dietary supplements, using science-y stuff like DNA, and what do you know? If you buy these dietary supplements there is an excellent chance you aren't getting any of what you thought you were paying for.

As reported in today's Times, "DNA tests show that many pills labeled as healing herbs are little more than powdered rice and weeds."

In fact, the study shows that some of the products from some of the companies contain some of the ingredient people are paying for, but the herbal products from two companies contained no--zero--of the product named on the label. Even where there are some herbal products with some minimal evidence to support a beneficial effect, such as St. John's Wort for mild depression, the active ingredient couldn't be counted on to be there.

People are buying these products under the understandable misimpression that they are going to cure their medical conditions. (And yes, what are code words like  "promotes normal cholesterol levels", "slow down the doubling time of your PSA (male prostate) levels when cancer is present" but thinly disguised claims to cure medical conditions?) Nevertheless, don't you think people should at least get what they're paying for?

I don't go so far as to say that every peddler of herbal supplements is an outright fraud: I leave that to the homeopathic remedies.

There have been instances, such as the ephedra case, where dietary supplements have been taken off the market, but this new study makes it clear that the entire industry is irredeemably corrupt, and the only way to correct the situation is to repeal the law.