> Why does the danger of thalidomide justify giving the FDA extensive powers to regulate the effectiveness of treatments?
... because it wasn't safe for use by pregnant women? Am I not understanding part of what you're saying?
I wouldn't consider that to be truly "effective" when the side-effects are quite serious. And by the nature of the medication, all pregnant women taking the drug are necessarily at risk of these side effects.
The big debate is whether the FDA should approve a drug as being "safe and effective", or whether it should just declare a drug "safe" and then leave it to doctors to decide what they use. The later is what most of the world uses and what reformers want the FDA to adopt. Moving to the later would not have done anything to prevent the Thalidomide tragedy.
Treatments that are safe but not effective can be dangerous as well, if they replace or prevent access to other more effective treatments. There is a pretty vast information imbalance between doctors and patients, and patients may not always have the time or knowledge to investigate the effectiveness of a treatment. The FDA does this research for the patients, and approves what claims can be made by doctors about a given treatment's effectiveness.
Most first-world countries have a form of socialized healthcare. Before any new drug is admitted to market in that kind of system you need to have proof that it offers an improvement to what is already available - you can't ask the taxpayer to pay premium prices for something that offers no improvement over what's already available.
... because it wasn't safe for use by pregnant women? Am I not understanding part of what you're saying?
I wouldn't consider that to be truly "effective" when the side-effects are quite serious. And by the nature of the medication, all pregnant women taking the drug are necessarily at risk of these side effects.