“Natural” remedies are being removed from health food stores when they’re actually proven to have the effects they claim to have. On the one hand, I can see that if a product actually has a medical effect, it should be sold in a pharmacy, where pharmacists can counsel patients about its effects, side effects, contraindications, interactions with other meds, etc. On the other hand, plenty of powerful and potentially damaging and fatal drugs, e.g. acetaminophen, are now being sold over the counter in grocery stores. I’m guessing that the average health food store clerk has a bit more knowledge about the treatments she sells than the average check-out girl. Probably. It’s admittedly the case that the medications that are being sold over-the-counter have generally been used as treatments for years, and that their mechanism of action and effects are well understood. I find it hard to believe that acetaminophen is less innocuous than tea-tree oil, however.

I’m not a big supporter of the “natural medicine” industry, at least insofar as it promotes crap like homeopathic medicine, but it seems like the pharmaceutical industry is actively trying to screw over health food stores. I definitely don’t believe that “natural” remedies are always better than those remedies marketed by the pharmaceutical industry. But it’s unfair to an industry to require that its products are ineffective.

Perhaps most importantly, this decision reduces medical consumers’ personal agency when it comes to treating their complaints. Sure, consumers don’t know everything, but neither do doctors. I’d rather treat my toenail fungus with tea-tree oil than with a drug that’s harsh to the liver and that I have to take for six months. In the end, I think I’m against this decision primarily I don’t like having the choices I can make about my health limited by the pharmaceutical industry. Their actions are hardly guided by what’s best for the consumer.