I agree it is more complicated than just pointing the finger at one entity. It is just a shame that our government feels the need to ban relatively safe substances, like ephedrine, that have the ability to help a lot of people with obesity when used in moderate/safe doses. Yet, at the same time lobbyists succeed at keeping cigarettes legal, contributing not only to decreased quality of life, but also spiking up medical costs for the whole country for the medical treatments that result when cancer and other complications are diagnosed.
Well you are looking at it from a companies point of view, which makes sense since that is your life. But, I work in a university research laboratory so our main goal isn't really profit or finding new ways to create a drug to patent. What I was getting at was that we can't actually do the studies that we want to, because if were to say "we would like to see if this probiotic has the potential to decrease diarrheal disease in infants" the fda would say "no, no, no, you can't do that. If you want to say that and test that you have to go through the drug testing process. This of course involves multiple clinical trials which will take ten + years and then has to be prescribed by a physician. We are in a nutritional science department so our goal is to test dietary components and how they affect immunity and GI disorders. We don't have the goal of testing a drug, just find dietary supplements that can help people. Thus, we have to beat around the bush in order to test what we want to test and say that we are doing it for another reason. We basically have to say "we aren't testing to see if this will improve outcomes for this disease, we are doing this to see how it affects sick days or this blood protein." And after we show that it could be used to treat this disorder/disease based on what we tested, we can't claim that about the supplement because that is something only a "drug" is capable of doing. So that is my rant about the fda's semantics.