So, I was going to subtitle the first of my posts “Why the FDA is cray cray,” but “Why the FDA” seems more appropriate.
Why indeed? What do we need the FDA for? It’s supposed to keep us safe from bad medicines….maybe once upon a fairy tale it did that…but I suspect this has not been happening for some time.
I’m no expert. I am a 25 plus year practicing veterinarian. I knows sumpin bout the ole FDA. NONE of it is good. As a veterinarian, we are often downstream of all the nonsense in human medicine. Our hands are further tied by the FDA, however in that our patients rarely get truly approved medicines. We do almost everything off label, but we are permitted to because everyone knows Pfizer ain’t gonna go out of it’s way to make goat medicine. That’s the facts and that’s fine.
What is NOT fine is when we are penalized for the stupidity of human medicine. This is where the term ‘shit rolls downhill’ comes into play. Yes, I am profane, get used to it. I can’t offend my patients, so don’t worry about my bedside manner. As long as you talk to a dog in a sing song voice, you can call him a shithead all day long and he’ll still wag his tail. Thankfully, ‘words are violence’ ain’t a thang with animals yet…..
Back to stupid human medicine. Back around 2016 the FDA got a burr up their butts and decided to ban powdered gloves. I went along….fat sweaty hands and all….for the greater good. I stupidly assumed that they had real reasons for the ban on powdered gloves and the incipient torture that is trying to stuff my sausage fingers that are sweating into sticky rubber gloves, WITHOUT touching the outside of the gloves. I assumed that it was vaguely related to the whole baby powder cancer thing.
Until all this mRNA nonsense, I suffered silently…ok well, I bitched a LOT about the sticky gloves. Once I started reading about all the ridiculous nonsense the FDA handed down around COVID vaccines and treatments, I started to doubt everything the FDA did.
This brings me back to the powdered gloves. Powdered gloves are GLORIOUS…they glide onto your fingers, regardless of sweatiness and fat fingers. They are SUBLIME. According to the FDA’s document about the banning of these gloves, the powder is some super anaphylactic carrier of latex molecules that magically wafts through the air, endangering staff and patient alike. Never mind that powdered gloves have been around since the 1970s in widespread use.
Because veterinarians are notoriously introverted and like animals WAAAY more than people, I chose to read the document used by the FDA to ban powdered gloves. It was mostly based on projections(sounds COVIDY don’t it?) of POSSIBLE allergic reactions. It was not based on any actual data, just projections. The FDA estimated that 0.01-1% of medical professionals MIGHT develop a latex allergy over time. The FDA admitted that the patient was unlikely to ever develop a reaction. Well, hmm.
I do 5-10 surgeries on most days that I work. I wriggle into a new pair of gloves each surgery. My sweaty little fat tree trunk fingers struggle to find the bottom of each finger as the sticky latex hangs up on every knuckle. Sometimes, I freely admit, I lose my temper and murder the glove rather than continue to struggle. The FDA claimed, in their reasoning(this is all online if you are REALLY bored, you can read it yourself—if I can find it on Google, so can you), that the unpowdered gloves weren’t hard to put on at all and that only 7% of medical professionals even used them anymore. I think they pulled that 7% out of their pontificating asses, cuz everyone I knew was using powdered gloves, but WHATEVER.
So, the FDA had to vigorously protect me from developing a latex allergy that I had failed to develop in 22 yrs of heavy surgical practice. They couldn’t allow me to sign a consent form and still get the powdered gloves and even went so far as to ban the damn powder. And of course, we were supposed to discard all of our powdered gloves by a certain date. I take the 5th on that action.
So….anyway…who the hell cares? Well, now fast forward to mRNA vaccines….which seem, at least from the studies I have read, to have a whole helluva lot of DOCUMENTED side effects associated with them. But the FDA still allows everyone to endanger themselves with THAT poison, but I can’t have freakin POWDERED surgical gloves???
Yeah…the FDA is cray cray.
Don’t get me started about compounded medications….maybe I’ll rant about that another day.