Eye drops are uniquely risky because the eye is an immune-privileged site.
This year has been marked by many terrifying things, but perhaps the most surprising of the 2023 horrors was … eye drops.
The seemingly innocuous teeny squeeze bottle made for alarming headlines numerous times during our current revolution around the sun, with lengthy lists of recalls, startling factory inspections, and ghastly reports of people developing near-untreatable bacterial infections, losing their eyes and vision, and dying.
…
Homeopathy is an 18th century pseudoscience that produces bogus remedies that work no better than a placebo and, if prepared improperly, can be toxic, even deadly. The practice relies on two false principles: the “law of similars,” aka “like cures like,” meaning a substance that causes a specific symptom in a healthy person can treat conditions and diseases that involve that same symptom, and the “law of infinitesimals,” which states that diluting the substance renders it more potent. As such, homeopathic products begin with toxic substances that are then extremely diluted—often into oblivion—in a ritualistic procedure. Some homeopaths hold that water molecules can have “memory.”
Homeopathy is legal today because when the laws regulating medicine took effect they were able to show - unlike the “snake oil” of the time they didn’t harm people. Since they were not actively and obviously harmful to someone they (like chiropractors) got a pass. Today we know far more and it is time to update our laws.
Homeopathy is legal today because of the Dietary Health & Supplement Education Act of 1994, bought and paid for by the “natural” remedy industry. Prior to that, the FDA had the power to require efficacy testing for all supplements and “remedies,” but this bill let them slap a “This statement has not been evaluated by the FDA” on the bottle and proceed to sell lies.
Honestly I think that’s fine unless the product is actively harming people like described in OP. Paying your way through the FDA approval process is expensive and there can be treatments that work but which it does not make financial sense for anyone to foot the bill, and people have a right to make their own choices about their own bodies and health.