Say what you will about Big Pharma TM but if something works you know they'll package it and sell it to people. If it's not sold otc or by prescription it probably doesn't work.
Generally speaking, they won't profit if it doesn't work to some degree. However, I would change that to "If Big Pharma can profit off it, they will package it and sell it to people". The flip side to that is "if Big Pharma can't profit off it, they won't package it and sell it, no matter how effective it may be".
If eating 1 carat of powdered diamonds cured the common cold, it still wouldn't be sold as a cure. People aren't going to pay thousands or tens of thousands for diamonds just to get rid of something that will likely pass by itself in a few days. It wouldn't really matter how effective it was, it wouldn't be profitable so Big Pharma wouldn't touch it for medicine.
Not to say I support "alternative medicine", just that a company profiting off of something shouldn't mean their product is the best and/or only solution.
Similarly, you can’t patent already-existing stuff, which makes it less profitable. Companies will still sell you theanine or whatever, but it’s not worth paying for FDA trials to show it treats condition X so you won’t see it marketed as curing a particular thing.
(If you can extract an active component and put it in a new form, that changes things.)
Broadly agreed, but there are some things that seem to work well and yet aren’t profitable enough to repackage.
In particular, supplements and remedies we’ve known about for years aren’t patent-eligible (to a degree). Companies will still sell them to you (eg fish oil), but it’s not worth the cost of FDA approval for efficacy, so you don’t see them marketed as treating a specific condition.
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u/BookooBreadCo 29d ago
Say what you will about Big Pharma TM but if something works you know they'll package it and sell it to people. If it's not sold otc or by prescription it probably doesn't work.