Anti-science, anti-real lifesaving medicine conspiracy theorists like to use the phrase "big pharma" to refer to the pharmaceutical industry. They love to talk about how its all a big conspiracy, how "big pharma" is trying to keep alternative "medicines" out of peer reviewed journals and trying to suppress it because they can't make money off of it. What these ignoramuses ignore is that alternative "medicine" is a multi-billion dollar industry! Large companies make billion selling alt-med crap that doesn't work. Millions make their livelihood selling alt-med crap.

The people who run the big alt med-companies and people who sell alt-med crap can and often are just as greedy as the major pharmaceutical companies. The difference is: the major pharmaceutical companies are regulated. Pharmaceutical companies have to prove the efficacy and safety of their products, people and companies who sell alt- med crap don't.
"But, but in the news there was this medicine that cause these bad things." You can't test for everything! If you want to find every possible drug interaction, food interaction and small side effect that could be huge in a small minority of people they would have to test their products for 50 years but that would be impractical. There is always going to be some risk in taking any drug (note: herbs are drugs but homeopathy is just water), but there is risk in everything you do. Drinking a coke if you have the right condition can cause major problems. You can't take a few instances of drugs slipping through the cracks as anything but drugs slipping through the cracks and you can't rely on the news media to get an accurate representation of the safety of a drug, you need to look at the peer reviewed literature for that.
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