FTC Issues Long-Awaited Enforcement Policy On OTC Homeopathic Drugs

We reported a few weeks ago about a new warning from FDA related to the safety of certain teething-related, non-prescription homeopathic drug products, and in that post we mentioned that both FDA and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) held public workshops in 2015 to gather information about this uniquely-regulated class of consumer products. Today, FTC released an Enforcement Policy Statement on Marketing Claims for OTC Homeopathic Drugs (available here); a Staff Report on the discussions held during the September 2015 workshop (available here); and an FTC blog post summarizing these actions.

For readers who are not familiar with homeopathy, the practice dates back to the 1700s and posits that disease symptoms can be treated by tiny doses of substances that produce similar symptoms if given in larger doses to healthy people ("like cures like"). Accordingly, modern-day homeopathic remedies that we find ubiquitously in drug stores today are highly diluted formulations,