For a long time, I didn’t know much about homeopathy, and just thought it was some sort of mild herbal medicine. Then one day while I was waiting for a prescription to be filled at my pharmacist’s I picked up a pamphlet advocating homeopathy and started reading. It very quickly became obvious that it was total quackery.

One reason (of several) that I figured out immediately that homeopathy was bunk were the persistent claims that there were absolutely no negative side effects and no possibility of them. The simple truth is that any medicine that’s powerful enough to do good very likely has the possibility to do bad as well. Real medicines are tested for both good and bad effects to verify that the good outweighs the bad for the intended patients. Many are only allowed to be dispensed under the supervision of a physician and a pharmacist. Sadly homeopathic remedies aren’t real medicines and aren’t subject to the same rigorous tests and procedures that genuine pharmaceuticals are.

As long as alternative medicine (alternative to medicine, really) is allowed it will be filled with fakes and fraudsters, con men and criminals, who prey on the desperate. Some are just in it for the money, but many of these evildoers seem to genuinely believe in what they’re doing. That makes it all the more important to regulate them out of existence. If there’s any truth at all to the wacky ideas that permeate the field, it is drowned in a sea of wishful thinking and incompetent amateur research. There’s a reason it takes years of study to become a doctor or a pharmacist or a Ph.D: medicine is hard. You can’t become a healer just because you want to be. You have to work at it, and these alternative shysters would rather just put out a shingle and make it up as they go along. If they act nice and sound convincing, too many people won’t realize they’re talking out of their posteriors.

Of course, not all M.D.s deserve to be called scientists or even understand basic research principles. I’ve met a few who really didn’t learn anything in Biology class except how to memorize the textbook. They got good scores on the MCATs by memorizing the definition of “double blind” without ever knowing what it was or why it mattered. Some of these are wasting their time and their patients money and lives prescribing homeopathic medicines. But the fact is most people who make it through medical school or vet school or pharmacy school have at least some background in science, and requiring a genuine degree before one is allowed to practice their crazy ideas on unsuspecting patients would at least weed out a large percentage of the wanna-bes and diploma-mill “graduates” that have caused so much pain and suffering.

I was looking at the store brand right next to the NyQuil when I noticed something funny. The store brand no longer said, “Compare to ingredients in NyQuil” like the store brand usually does when it wants to clue you in to the fact that it’s the exact same medicine, only 20-50% cheaper; so I looked closer.

Comparing the ingredients side-by-side I realized that the store brand contained pseudoephedrine (sounded vaguely familiar) but the NyQuil contained phenylephrine, which I didn’t think I’d heard of before. Had the scientists at Vicks invented some new, patented nasal decongestant the store brands couldn’t copy yet?

Well, no. They hadn’t. After I got home, I did a little googling and discovered that the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act now prohibited the sale of pseudoephedrine containing cold medicine off of store shelves. NyQuil decided that rather than requiring customers to ask a pharmacist for the product, they’d reformulate it with an older, less effective decongestant; but one that has the completely useless quality of being not quite as easily able to be turned into crystal meth.

The law doesn’t seem to be working by the way. I was easily able to buy two bottles of store brand NyQuil and DayQuil, both mimicking the old formulas with pseudoephedrine instead of phenylephrine. Perhaps the cash register automatically logged the purchase, though I’m not sure what good that did anyone since I paid cash. I didn’t have to show ID. So here we have a law that merely inconveniences legitimate users and doesn’t seem to stop illegitimate ones. Why does this remind me of DRM?