[ELI5] How governments allow snake oil “medicine” to sell on TV, light night? Some of these products are dangerous to people, like prostate crap that will do nothing and may prevent the people to survive if diagnosed too late?

Question

[ELI5] How governments allow snake oil “medicine” to sell on TV, light night? Some of these products are dangerous to people, like prostate crap that will do nothing and may prevent the people to survive if diagnosed too late?

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Answer 1

The issue isn’t that they are “allowing” it, so much as they ***aren’t*** “disallowing” it. Let me explain.

Essentially, under laws they have made to govern private sales, so long as those products aren’t boasted to be medically active beyond what they possibly could be, they cannot prevent the sales from happening.

Most of those snake oil “medicines”, are boasted as “alleviating the symptoms” (or some sort of phrasing that means the same, roughly), and so long as there is anything in there that could reasonably affect a symptom in any way, the product is legit for sale to that effect.

Is it indirectly dangerous? Yes, greatly. Should it be regulated better? Yes, definitely.

But they probably won’t… Because it’s usually not directly dangerous. To make the sale of something illegal, you need to have probably cause that it could be directly dangerous, and even then, you’re facing a major hurdle in that adults will claim “my body, my choice” on a lot if those things. That’s why alcohol and cigarettes are mostly available to adults: They are directly dangerous… But people don’t care, or really want to keep it around.