It’s at least meaningful action with merit, even if flawed potentially.

Meanwhile the USA sits while people like you posit on these potential alternate realities and tens of thousands of people per month are convinced not to vaccinate their children, to homeschool, to back Ponzi schemes and MLMs, to treat autism with bleach enemas, treating cancer with all sorts of scams, etc because some stupid asshole grifter on social media said to do it.

I don’t think you realize just how bad it is. I don’t think you realize just how ineffective our regulatory bodies are. I had a patient where I was working with their child over behavioral issues and they were desperate. They were low income, Medicaid, and they spent $800 on a device that “used magnetic stimulation” to help their child “realign their brain and body”. They found it via instagram.

When I asked about it they sent many links: one from the seller about “research” that was all about transcranial direct current stimulation/tdcs. That does have some potential evidence but this device did not work in that fashion. It made no contact with the temples and it had no electrical output, it guaranteed this to allay safety concerns. They clearly just put together a list of citations that looked somewhat relevant to the laymen but did not hold up to scrutiny in any way. The device itself had 0 research behind it, obviously.

The second link was the website to purchase and find out more about the device. The notable thing here was references to the FDA being plastered all over the site. This is the major lapse in regulatory body. I was shocked to see this. Looking into it more I found that it was a loophole utilized by these scummy scams. They will find a facility that is approved by the FDA for manufacturing something that is FDA approved (like a tens machine) and hire it out to manufacture their scam product. They can then plaster “manufactured in an FDA approved facility” all over their packaging, website, and ad copy, which is extremely misleading. As long as they don’t explicitly say FDA approved or use the FDA logo, which is government property, they are okay.

This is just one example. I’ve been working with mostly kids for almost 2 decades now. I’ve seen many more terrible things embraced, anti vaccination being the most popular. I’ve seen people waste precious time that is essential during early intervention periods on quack bullshit like facilitated communication then when they finally give up on that their child is years behind and never truly gains any meaningful communication ability (which, to be fair, may have been the case from the beginning, but it also may not if they had embraced evidence based practice).

I’m sick and tired of hemming and hawing about this bullshit and “what about the morons right to be an idiot?”. Not when the moron robs their child of the capacity for meaningful communication, a proper education and social development, facilitates outbreaks of disease, or is fronting to scam people.

Similarly China saw the obvious issue with loot boxes and banned them. Meanwhile we are still hemming and hawing about the ethics of allowing children to gamble because we desperately need to allow them to funnel cash to tech billionaires and start addictive behavioral patterns as young as humanly possible, apparently. They also saw the inherent ethical issues with fee for service medical billing and are taking huge steps to transition away from it. Meanwhile our health reform plan is apparently “go fuck yourself and die”.

It is unbelievably frustrating how badly we are failing and how much we have been conditioned to do nothing with statements like yours. “Well, if we do that, it could blow up in our face, much like it’s currently blowing up in our fucking face right as we speak, so I guess we should just do nothing then”