The Federation of State Medical Boards is actually an entirely private trade group that seems to exist to thwart competition.

For many months, we’ve been following the FDA’s war on natural medicine. The agency has been eliminating natural ingredients from the list of substances from which pharmacies can make customized medicines, such as curcumin, boswellia, and aloe vera.

We’ve also noted that the new regulations are making it difficult for doctors to get medicines like compounded vitamin B12, which is driving up the price for once-affordable IV vitamin B12 shots. Ironically, Hillary Clinton reports that she gets these shots, but then again, she does not have to worry about the cost. Bioidentical hormones, such as Estriol, are also threatened.

Unfortunately, the FDA is not the only danger to customized natural medicines.

The Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) recently considered adopting a position statement encouraging physicians to avoid engaging in “office use” (compounding medications in bulk in anticipation of patient need) and to avoid making sterile medications in their offices. Instead, physicians would be encouraged to get sterile medications from 503B “outsourcing” facilities.

These positions strike us as patently absurd, driven by Big Pharma, and part of the effort to eliminate customized, natural medicines from the market.

The compounding of sterile drugs must of course be carefully done to avoid contamination, but as long as a doctor has the proper training and equipment—which any skilled and responsible doctor would—any risk would be substantially mitigated. This position against in-office sterile compounding could also interfere with in-office IV nutritional therapy, where a doctor makes an intravenous nutrient bag based on the needs of an individual patient. Many physicians and patients may not be able to afford the alternatives, such as using a hospital pharmacy. This is likely the FSMB’s intent—to make the practice of personalized and integrative medicine more and more difficult.

It is also telling that the position statement explicitly encourages doctors to get their sterile medications from outsourcing pharmacies. We recently reported that the FDA has been trying to wipe traditional compounding pharmacies off the map by forcing them to register instead as outsourcing facilities, since what can be compounded at outsourcing facilities is completely at the FDA’s whim and can be very narrowly defined. This will likely eliminate many traditional compounding pharmacies, and leave only the largest ones open for business—by then owned by Big Pharma.