Hear What This Doctor Says About the FDA and Other Agencies!

Interviewer: Doctor, if you could, highlight some of the big advances in anti-aging medicine since the formation of your group. Just pick the top couple or three that really kind of stand out. Dr. Klatz: Well, I don't want to take credit for it, but I will if you let me. It's really pretty amazing. You've got to realize back in 1992 when A4M was formed they were raiding doctor's offices, the feds were raiding doctor's offices at gunpoint for prescribing things like vitamin A, vitamin C, and vitamin E, and other non-toxic therapies. There was very little in the way of what we might consider non-toxic or integrative health care or alternative health care. There really was none. Anti-aging medicine, the A4M, really made it safe for researchers to come out and talk about these other non-drug therapies. Although we don't want to give the wrong impression, it's not that we're against drug therapies. We're all for anything that works and there are things that work as well or better than prescription drugs. We're for everything that works which can help to ameliorate the degenerative processes of aging. Some of the things that have come along that have proved themselves quite well is high dose antioxidant therapies, which is vitamin therapies, hormone replacement therapies, bio-identical hormone replacement therapies. These are all outshoots or outgrowths of the anti-aging medicine movement. Stem cell therapies, cloning technology is still working its way through the laboratories, but that's another technology that really did not exist before A4M came along. Again, I don't want to claim that we're the ones that made it happen. We made it safe for it happen, I think is the best way to say it. Genetic engineering, again genetic therapies have come along and are proving to be very, very helpful, at least in the diagnostic arena and to a limited extent in the therapeutic arena. We're going to see amazing things with genetic therapies. All these are really exciting new innovations that have occurred since the anti-aging medicine and the A4M. Interviewer: Some 20 plus years later as new therapies come about, do you still see, maybe not to the degree of raiding doctor's offices, but is there still some backlash regarding newer therapies? Dr. Klatz: The sad reality is that the FDA and the regulatory agencies are not necessarily there to protect the people as they like to claim. The sad reality is that these regulatory agencies, more often than not, protect the establishment and the pharmaceutical industry and the people who have the patents on the drugs. Because of that, I think it's exceedingly rare to see the regulatory agencies go against things that don't work. I don't see it happening. I don't see the regulatory agencies concern themselves with things that are bogus. Now sometimes they'll go after things that are dangerous, but there's not that much out there that's dangerous. The worst you can say about most therapies, in the medical arena at least, is that they're not very effective. I don't see the regulatory agencies going after the ineffective therapies. I see them going after the effective therapies that are taking money away from the established pharmaceutical industries. That is a political issue and that continues today just as it did in the past. The FDA has recently decided to raid doctor's offices and manufacturers of HCG. Oh my God, HCG has been on the market for 50 years. God knows how much, maybe longer than that, maybe 60 or 70 years. Their claim is that it's ineffective. Well, it's certainly not unsafe. It's been used for 60 years at least, but is it effective or is it not effective? There's a heck of a lot of people who seem to have lost weight with the benefit of this. Even if it's just a very good placebo, what the heck is wrong with that? It's cheap. It's safe and it seems to be working for some people. That's just, I think, the latest example of regulation gone wrong. I think the regulatory bodies should be there to do the job they say they're there to do, which is to protect the public against dangerous things. If something's not dangerous, they should keep their nose out of it because then it's a market place that will solve the issues. People should have the right to make their own choices. Their own informed, intelligent choices.