many natural things are great for arthritis.
but in the US it is illegal to advertise effects for non FDA things (natural things)
so you dont hear about it and thus began to believe its all silly hippy stuff.
Well I'm sure at least some natural therapies are effective, you just need to prove that they are. However, many natural therapies have been proven to be ineffective (But usually safe). I can point out some pretty big systematic reviews of clinical studies for some specific examples if you want.
It's not just a coincidence that the FDA doesn't tend to approve things that are natural (pulled right out of the ground, minimally processed, etc). However, it's not because they're trying to hide the real cures or anything. It's because the methodology for ensuring how much of one type of drug exists in a pill of a fixed mass requires a lot of chemical processing. Additionally, a lot of these natural medicines vary significantly in chemical composition. For example, in one systematic review I looked at for an anti-insomnia treatment with Valerian root, there were 4 or 5 different ways that manufacturers created the final product, which would skew data if you indiscriminately selected different medicines to be taken by the experimental cohort.
The difficulty here is that the FDA looks for medicines whose effect on the body can be explained in physiological terms using chemistry and modern science. When you know a drug is effective but you can't explain why, it makes it incredibly difficult to sham-control a treatment in a clinical study because you don't know what the effective step is.
Oh also, I forgot to mention that it's not illegal to advertise effects for treatments that haven't been approved by the FDA. You'll just have to place a disclaimer on your website or on your TV commercials..
