Herbal supplements in US commonly have traces of contaminants

Less bureaucracy doesn't mean more freedom. Less regulation doesn't mean more freedom, because frequently we need regulations to protect our freedom.Government isn't the only thing that can take your freedom, that's what the free marketeers so frequently forget. Any business, for instance, is going to consider it highly profitable to take away my freedom to purchase anything but their products (or, really, rent their products, because businesses are fundamentally rent-seeking.)

No, you know what it says on the package. Without regulation there's absolutely no reason to believe that what it says on the package is actually what it is. Maybe it's just oregano - would anybody ever notice? (It's not like herbs work anyway.) Or maybe it's kudzu.Or maybe it's milkweed. How are you going to stop people from trading with those countries, except by regulation?Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

No, profits come from buying low and selling high - like, for instance, the fly-by-night companies that, in your unregulated world, pack whatever dried green stuff they can find into pills, call it "St. John's Wort" and "Echinacia" and sell plant refuse for a dollar a pill, then close up shop before they can be sued.Quick - without looking it up, tell me the brand name of the herbal supplements in your medicine cabinet.You can't, can you? If these companies are operating with essentially no brand recognition at all, how are you even going to remember to punish them with your pocketbook?In the real world, we understand that even in actual medicine people don't have the expertise and training to accurately associate health outcomes with interventions. If you take Supplement A, and you pray, and you eat your mother-in-law's chicken soup, and you got some rest and drank plenty of fluids, and then your cold symptoms went away - what worked? Was it the supplement or the rest? The prayer or the soup? Or was it none of it, and you just got better on your own?Plenty of people use Head-On for their headaches and are convinced it works, even though Head-On is nothing but a wax stick. It has literally no active ingredients. The thing about headaches is - they go away on their own. And you rarely time how long it takes, so you're completely unequipped to assess the efficacy of Head-On.Assessing the efficacy of a medical intervention, or a drug, or an herb, isn't something you can do just by taking it and seeing if you get better or feel better. Haven't you heard of the "placebo effect"? It's not magic, or "mind over matter", it's just a function of the fact that your subjective experience of illness is subject to your own expectations, and if you expect to feel better, you'll convince yourself that you really do. The efficacy of treatment, herbal or traditional, has to be assessed on the basis of double-blind trials. That's the only way to know if they really work. Anything else is just quackery.

Shorter Buz - contaiminated herbs have to poison somebody, or the fascists win!

No, Buz. Not even close.I'm saying that you're labelling the people who want sensible regulation of herbal products "fascists".I'm lampooning your position. That's why it says "shorter Buz". That's an internet synonym that means "So, to sum up your position, in other words:".

Regulations protected thousands of Americans from being deformed by thalidomide. In Canada and Europe, thousands more were born with deformities because there was literally no information, to be had at any price or by any means by any consumer, on the effects on developing infants in mothers taking the drug.No testing is required to be done on these herbals. Buz will tell you that if it comes from a plant, it must be harmless at worst; that completely ignores the vast panopoly of plant toxins.Indeed the only reason any of these herbals have any physiological effect at all is because the plants are producing toxins. Those polyphenols are the plant's own natural pesticides. You're taking herbs that are trying to kill you.

If there's no regulation enforcing testing, then why would someone have their product tested for efficacy? It's much more effective to simply tell people its effective than to go to the great expense of showing it. As well, there's considerable risk that your test may discover that the product is not effective, so what's the incentive for an herb seller to do efficacy testing?None at all. All the market incentives are for them to simply lie and say they've tested it.

Maybe you could be a little more specific about what you mean by "chemical"? If your herbals have any effect at all it's because of the chemicals they contain - the natural chemicals produced by that specific plant, presumably. Not because of any physical constituents they have, or lack, but because of an anti-regulatory game played by the altie-medicine industry - they lobbied to have them falsely considered "food supplements" to escape onerous regulations, even though you've made it abundantly clear that people take them for primarily medical, not nutritional reasons.But if they weren't drugs, they wouldn't do anything, by definition.

Also, Buz, why don't you take aspirin? Aspirin is from willow's bark. Does it not count as a herbal unless it's literally from an herb?