[Kuiper]

The author of the article also seems to imply that FDA approval is the only process by which a treatment could be "proven effective." There are many treatments that are already available in Europe but spend years waiting for FDA approval.

There's also the fact that even when a drug does successfully pass through the FDA testing process, there can be a period of up to a year between the drug being successful in Phase 3 trials and actually getting approved for prescription. If you're a terminally ill patient, a 12 month waiting period between "proven in phase 3 trial" and "actually finally getting the FDA's rubber stamp" can be a long time.

[XorNot]

The FDA allows "compassionate use" exceptions for this type of thing and generally grants them. The point of the approval process (and the entire FDA) is to prevent charlatans peddling dangerous and ineffective therapies and drugs to desperate people for profit.

Which is what this article is about: you can have no choices, but here, pay us a ton of money for UnprovenDrug(TM)! It might work according to nobody but us.

You're making the classic misstep of assuming a Pascal's wager type situation - as though there's only ever 1 unproven option out there so you might as well, when in reality there's many and getting scammed out of all your money on one means you can't try others which actually might work.