Playing Doctor: Herbal Medicine in A New World Economy

I appreciate your story and your recovery. It is this unfortunate mindset in American culture however that every drug and every physician is somehow in the business of making sick in order to make money. Are not the companies that prepare these herbs and sell them for outrageous proces making money. I think Solaray and Nature's Way are doing just fine becuase people spend more money on herbs than prescription medications yet we do not demonize the companies that sell them...why not? Another statement has me bummed out, "Doctors would miss out on perks like all expenses paid “training” trips to exotic resorts courtesy of their big pharma friends if we were all drinking nettle and dandelion tea instead of taking Prilosec" I may have a rep bring lunch to my office, which I allow so my hourly folks can have a free lunch, but that's it. The days you are talking about are long gone and in most cases against the law. People can still drink their dandelion tea and nettle, but what if some people like the idea of regulated pharmaceuticals. Your reference makes it look like those poeple that take prescriptions drugs are doing something wrong. If you want to make a change in the medical community, unfortunately, there needs to be evidnce based work. This is not going to change any time soon. Many of our drugs come from plants like many chemotherapeutic agents and hormones. Do they become evil once they are patented or is it only in the natural form that they are good. In the case of hormones "wild yam" cannot be utilized by the human body to make estrogen or progesterone, yet it is sold by the vats in stores and is essentially worthless. Wil yam must be converted by an enzymen in a lab into estrogen before our human bodies can utilize the effects. Does this mean that companies selling Wild Yam over the counter are not comitting fradulent claims? My point is that we should not demonize one side and beatify the other....they both have their problems. Herbal medications should be looked at like prescription medications with studies done by programs like the program of Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona. Sound medical evidence could potentially show that P'au de Arco cures certain cancers, the problem would be that once that is shown.....big pharmacy would swoop in to cash in. Shawn A. Tassone, M.D.

I wrote a paper on the effects of apricot kernels or laetrile's on cancer and how it's believed to be a cure. The people of the Hunza tribe in Pakistan base their wealth on how many apricot trees they own. Them and many many indigenous cultures have not had one single reported instance of cancer and they've been this way for hundreds of years. Yet, in order to provide two sides to the argument, I had to use info from "quakwatch.com" to counter the argument and it was quite painful how obviously biased they were. Thank you for writing this article. We're not alone. Namaste, Sam

This is the essential problem here isn't it. Things never work to the interest of the people when they leave it up to regulators and bureaucrats. As we've seen with everything, from healthcare, to the environment, to education, big business hijacks government and turns it into their own advertising agency, presenting a facade of official/science/research/authority, manipulating people to their own ends. The essential problem of our time is the "unfortunate mindset" that government is looking out for you. People have given up inner authority and have come to see their experience and sense of truth as unworthy - instead we let bureaucrats tell us what to eat, wear, say, do, and be. And look at where that has lead us - destruction of health, environment, peace and all that is sacred. Give up responsibility and look what happens.

 

"They must find it hard, those who have taken authority as truth, rather than truth as authority" Gerald Massey

An excellent essay. This part really leapt out at me: "Herbs are becoming the marijuana of the 21st century. The government propaganda that circulated about the widely revered and respected cannabis plant in the early 1900’s (and still today) that eventually made the herb illegal is happening to over the counter herbal medicines now. We’re looking at the potential ban of dozens, possibly even hundreds of highly effective and valuable herbs. Will we need a prescription to drink a cup of peppermint tea one day? (Coke and Pepsi will still be legal, of course.)" That's so true. Few can see the obvious, though anyone familiar with the Codex Alimentarius agenda can see the writing on the wall, in this regard. I've thought this for a while, but seeing someone else put it in print gave me a bit of a jolt. Enough that the muse took me to write a short-short dealing with this issue. Anyone who wants can check it out at my new blog, Dreamscapes and Night Terrors.

 

The Revolution is Within

"(Just being put to sleep for surgery has a 1.5% risk of death from the general anesthesia!)" Actually, the risk of death or permanent disability from general anesthesia is around 1 in 300000, not 1.5 in 100! The incidence of swollen lymph nodes is very high, and they are usually not from cancer. Hodgkin's Disease is one of many causes of swollen lymph nodes. They do not cut you open from ear to ear to biopsy the lymph nodes. Hodgkin's is completely curable in more than 90% of cases. 10 year survival in untreated Hodgkin's patients is 70%. I agree that Big Pharma is not out to do anything but make money, but your arguments are not helped by faulty logic or statistics.

For those that bring up the point about herb-selling companies having the same motives for sales as pharmacutecals, consider this. A pharmacutecal drug must be synthetically created, priced, and then marked up to be sold, with a sometimes outrageous list of side-effetcs. An herb or natural remedy is sold inexpensively without a doctors consent for a reason, they do not harm the body as a pharmacutecal does. Never will you step into a vitamin store and hear that obnoxious voice pounding out warning after warning about the herb you are about to purchase. We cannot deny the usefulness and effectiveness of natural remedies, and if this is so, why must they be limited and restrained from full research, and medicinal potential that our drug companies recieve. It is sort of a violation of rights for both ancient and new found herbs.

To seperate ourselves from the masses, and be truly unique, we must speak how no one else speaks, think and dwell upon a life that no one else lives, and remember that matter is only a barrier to mindfulness.

-  Me

I am the first person to say that profit and medicine do not mix. It sounds like you had a very frightening experience, and I believe that even more than herbs, the most important thing we can do for our health is to eat a balanced diet free of processed or industrial foods. Natural foods, so to speak. Not to belabor the point, but .05% is still too high a number for anesthesia related mortality. .05% is 5 deaths per 1000 patients. The real mortality of anesthesia being 1 in 300000 patients is desribed as 5 deaths per 1500000 patients, or .0003%. Crossing the street, riding a bicycle or riding a horse is much more dangerous, to say nothing of riding in a motor vehicle. Best wishes that you are happy, well and at peace.

Thank you for the article. I particularly delighted in your question: is cancer a fraud?

The boogey-man aspect of cancer seems to correspond to the way, once, people thought about scurvy and puerperal fever.

If the cause of scurvy were not known today, we might see "specialists" trying to cure it with chemo and radiation and salves or even herbs and physical manipulation or change of residence.

Unless the herbs had ascorbic acid in sufficient amounts, even herbs wouldn't help for scurvy a bit. And chemo nor radiation would help not one jot.

But the person in the hospital or clinic might be given some jello with fruit or a diet rich in ascorbic acid, and when they improved, they'd say: see? radiation and chemo helps!

It took the Scottish Naval Surgeon James Lind to show that scurvy would respond to the simple addition to diet of citrus fruit (Limes) in the 1750s. It took many years for his and others' findings to be instituted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scurvy

Puerperal fever was a fulminating infection associated with child-birth.

If anti-biotics had been in existence when this scourge was around, perhaps this disease would have been eliminated by their application, and the actual cause might have been neglected. And that cause was primarilly in the fact that the surgeons who were responsible for delivery didn't wash their hands before touching the patient. They'd come from the dissection rooms or anatomy classes where they delt with corpses of dogs, frogs, humans and what-not (or even from the bathroom), and go right to work on the unfortunate mothers with their unclean hands.

Ignaz Semmelweis determined the primary issue surrounding 'puerperal fever' or infection and sepsis or septicaemia in birthing mothers in the 1840s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

Again, the simple facts that could prevent this were ignored for a long time and the facts were mocked by so-called other 'experts'.

At the turn of the 19th-20th century, another Scot: John Beard noticed that cancer cells closely resembled the cells of normal pregancy tropbhoblasts or placental cells visually and by behavior.

By a brilliant series of deductions and experiment, he determined that the primary operative principle in child-birth could be applied to the elimination of cancer: the digestive enzymes of the pancreas.

Today, we know for a fact that Beard was correct in seeing in all cancers as trophoblastic (placental-cells), since it was proven in the 1990s by Dr. Hernan Acevedo by use of flow cytometry and delineation of genetic motifs shared only by cancers and normal placental cells (trophoblasts).

It is still not universally acknowledged that these 'placental cells' are deposed by pancreatic or hydrolytic enzymes normal to every human being . . . both in normal pregnancy and in cancers where applied rationally.

It seems that people resist this information partially on the anti-intuitive fact that a 'placental cell' should arise in a man or non-pregnant female. Yet they do.

This cellular type is definitely part and parcel to our normal genome and if it weren't, no one would be here except by cloning. The only rational generalization that can be arrived at here is that both internal gestation and cancer are involved in regeneration, since both are dependent on the most potent cells in the life cycle: the diploid totipotent cells or 'stem cells'.

In fact, that we can both reproduce and get cancer equally point to an empirical fact (now no longer disputed): that adults also possess a compliment of 'stem cells' capable of regenerating the entire compliment of cells that we are told are 'determined' with limited abilities to divide.

That trophoblast cells can become active outside pregnancy there is no doubt.

When it does, then we call it cancer.

In the hit-and-miss approach of empirical medicine, many different ways and means of dealing with this problem have also had hits and misses.

Where they work, we can discern that in some way they impinge either directly on the defensive enzymes of the body so as to enable them to digest the cancer cells; or by inhibiting the destructive enzymes emitted by the cancer cells or any mechanism whereby cancer cells function normally (trophoblast biochemistry in other words) the problem can be resolved.

Evidently, just having digestive enzymes isn't enough. This is where 'cofactors' or 'co-enzymes' (read vitamins) may be involved.

And yet, just having such cofactors or vitamin or vitamins wouldn't be sufficient. Hence, the 'hit and miss' tactic of non-rational approach due to ignorance of cause and environment.

After having looked into the literature surrounding the work of John Beard and the related datums concerning enzyme function, we found a most interesting paper that might explain why many herbs and 'laetrile' might have curative effect.

It was written in 1910 by Mendel and Blood

Mendel, L.B. and Blood, A.F., Some Peculiarities of the Proteolytic Activity of Papain: The Acceleration of Proteolysis by HCN, J.Biol.Chem, Vol. 8:177-213, 1910

A reprint of which is available at:

http://www.jbc.org/cgi/reprint/8/3/177

This paper showed that for Papain, the primary digestive or hydrolytic enzyme in the fruit papaya, it only functions properly in the presence of hydrocyanic acid. This is another 'boogey-man' in modern chemistry and medicinal thinking, since they associate it with the simplified term CYANIDE. The stuff of secret agents and space-men who can take a special form of it to die quickly and relatively painlessly.

In the study by Mendell and Blood, it was shown that the simple molecule HCN seemed to correspond to the definition then and now accepted as a 'co-enzyme'.

It accelerates the digestive properties of the enzyme and extends its life or ability to hydrolyze substrates.

The popular awareness of this molecule is almost indissoluably associate with the 'laetrile' controversy.

The primary advocates for the popular mode of application (amygdalin or 'laetriles') conceived of this as a 'selective poison' to cancer cells, while being harmless to normal cells or 'soma'.

The work by Mendel and Blood showed that the role of HCN was in direct relationship to an ENZYME.

Other work showed that the same function these two saw with Papain, also obtained with the human digestive enzyme trypsin, a protease.

The pancreas is the center of the biological human universe. It is a truism of biological function that enzymes are the 'vital force' with rigard to the absorption of extraneous matter. For we live by the constant dissolution of forms outside our own.

When a vitamin is applied by itself without respect to the other subtances which they either augment or activate or facilitate, we show our ignorance of the meaning of the phrase: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Similarly, application of extrinsic enzymes without regard to the co-factors and vitamins that make them functional will not result in toward results.

We must take the whole and analyse the whole in its healthiest state and analyse that. But we prefer to analyse disease and hopefully find out something by that means.

Herbs are wonderful resources. The pharmacopeia of the 1890s to about 1930 was practically 99 per cent herbal. The reverse is true today.

Nonetheless, the utility of that was not at all 'rational'. Not based on understanding of biochemistry.

We can look at 'Essiac' and 'Hoxey' and 'Coley's toxins' and many other so-called 'alternatives' or modes outside the dogmatic religion that we call 'medicine' of any day, including today, and see yet within all successes a single thread of rationality with regard to cancer remission or regression: trophoblastic biochemistry or form is limited or destroyed.

Amongst all these different approaches, the biochemistry of trophoblasts is the bottom line, since all cancers are proven to be trophoblastic.

This is the rational approach as opposed to the 'empiric' approach to a problem. Since this is amongst the most complex issues touching on mammalian life that encloses not only this as 'disease' but as touching on both replication and regeneration, I suppose it is no wonder that there is so much confusion and resistance to a simple principle of research and application.

Today, a doctor in Italy, Simoncini, has discovered a key 'carcinogenic' in yeast infections. Yet he, too, resists the recognition of definite scientific findings: that all cancers are trophoblastic. By simply changing the pH of the cancer or tumor environs, he has enabled many cures purportedly.

See: http://www.curenaturalicancro.com/

Let us suppose that he was around 100 year ago, and all cancers were treated and cured with just baking soda. We would still be ignorant of the FACT that cancers of all kinds are trophoblastic and related to the reality of internal gestation and internal regeneration. A 'cure' would not mean the disease was understood.

We understand the biochemistry of ascorbic acid today pretty well. We don't know it all. But the idea of 'vitamin' might be still outside our conception if we simply stopped at pragmatic application of limes or fruit juices to stave off 'scurvy'.

And if we had accepted the concept of the Krebses that 'amygdalin' was the 'anti-cancer vitamin', rather than that HCN was the 'vitamin' and it's role was in direct relation to specific enzymes, we'd still be in the dark.

HCN and 'laetrile' are not the same things. HCN is carried by amygdalin and the many other nitriles that occur in nature and which we use as foods every day. But HCN by itself is practically meaningless with regard to cancer. It is only in relationship to the body's own enzymes and some dietary enzymes that HCN (which can be found in many herbs like 'clover') has relevance. But it has powerful relevance in that case.

Even a hundred years ago, different thinkers saw something in Beard's work that even Beard resisted: that there is a common thread in all cancers: pancreatic insufficiency.

And this can be traced by careful research to dietary and dietary practices.

We know, too, that certain minerals are essential for normal pancreatic enzyme function. Like chromium 3 plus or so-called 'glucose tolerance factor'. This metal ion is essential for the normal function of both trypsin and the normal function of insulin.

The pancreas is both an excretory and secretory organ. That is, it is both an exocrine gland and an endocrine gland.

The exocrine organ or excretory (ductile) function deposits digestive enzymes into our digestive tract. The endocrine part or secretory (ductless) function perfuses the blood stream with insulin and other special molecules directly related to the normal function of the exocrine pancreas and system-wide-acting molecules.

We see definite relationship between malfunction of one part of the pancreas and malfuntion in the other part here. The pancreas is one of the essential 'keystones' to optimal health.

Diabetes is a common 'paraneoplastic' disorder. And cancer is a common paradiabetic disorder or complication of diabetics.

In other words, cancer occurs more often in diabetics than in non-diabetics, and diabetes often arises in cancer patients. I believe the diabetic condition is often missed in cancer patients, so the frequency is probably even higher than currently recognised.

Cancer patients often die of 'cachexia' or 'wasting' which can be directly traced to the digestive functions including an inability to absorb vital factors like amino acids. Which results in yet other paraneoplastic 'complications' like susceptibility to infection and pneumonia. It is often a consternation to coroners what to put down as the 'cause of death'.

Well, should we be surprised at cachexia (wasting) if the digestive enzymes that produce amino acids from proteins are themselves inhibited by cancer hormones? And this is a fact.

Indeed, the primary cancer hormone is the self-same hormone detected by OTC pregnancy tests. (ELISAs)

hCG beta (human chorionic gonadotropin-beta) is produced by only two cell classes: trophoblasts and cancer.

So, there is a commonality here both in issues of disorders (and even the so-called 'morning sickness' of pregnancy can be seen in the cancer patient undergoing remission . . . outside any chemotherapy); and where herbals work or any method whatever, there is a means from this principle or essential recognized and scientific fact to bring them under the umbrella and render them many times more effective and efficient than has obtained heretofore, because we didn't know what the 'animal' was we were dealing with. Nor the reins. Now we do.

All cancers are trophoblastic, and the digestive enzymes are the primary 'reins' or control of this 'beast'. Whatever potentiates the enzymes or facilitates the enzymes and augments the enzymes has rationality on their connectivity to the function of these hydrolytic enzymes. Period.

Similarly, whatever limits pregnancy, limits trophoblastic function or impinges on trophoblastic function in any of its phases must also impinge on the function of any cancer sharing any property with the ranges of trophoblasts. Period.

There are far too many issues involved here to delineate in a mere response to an article here.

See these papers:

www.navi.net/~rsc/thesis.htm

www.navi.net/~rsc/iet_txt.html

And with respect to any 'enzyme therapy', Beard was also the first one to see that 'protease' therapy is not rational, either. ALL the enzymes of the pancreas are important, but in cancer therapy, it is essential to pay attention to the 'glycolytic' enzyme: AMYLASE.

See:

http://users.navi.net/~rsc/beard066.htm

and:

http://www.navi.net/~rsc/sialo.htm

This fact is sorely neglected by many so-called 'immuno-enzyme' specialists.

See also, Ralph Moss' excellent article on John Beard at:

http://ict.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/7/4/229

With regard to GTF: see:

Saner,G., Chromium in Nutrition and Disease, Alan Liss, Inc. New York, 1980, p. 16 re: chromium facilitated insulin-amino-acid delivery; p.17, re: optimal action of trypsin with chromium.

Thanks again for a well written piece.

Some spelling and other errors are probably to be found. Don't discount the information for such, please

The 'bogey-man' of a diagnosis of 'cancer' today carries a definite 'mythos' and a mental environment that we are expected to believe or have faith in as a sentence of death.

The exact same fear or belief-system once surrounded the issue of scurvy.

We know for a fact that many 'herbalists' and 'doktors' made a living, and profited by such ignorance of facts.

We also know that MOST mothers, even when touched by the unclean 'doktors' (who were un-needed) at the moment of delivery DID NOT GET SICK.

This brings us to a real crux with regard to what is taken as a veritable 'principle' of modern medicine based on the ideas of Pasteur and the 'germ' or 'infection' theory.

Some thinkers like to mention an 'alternative' conception along the lines of Bechamp, who accentuated, in primitive form, the concept of natural 'resistance' or 'immunity'.

From the perspective of the 'immuno-enzymologist', the issues of both devolves on a third or category or 'union' set: nutrition.

A 'subset' of 'nutrition' has yet to be defined by strictures of so-called 'scientific method': that thought or thinking and faith or belief impinges not only on actions or muscle-movement, but on the functionality of perfusing molecules in the body like enzymes and hormones.

Fear, doubt, pessimism, and acrimony definitely are correlated with digestive potency and immunity, to say nothing about social interactions and political fall-out.

We know for a fact that anger is a necessary and essential property of immunity AND social responsibility.

We know, too, that anger in its mildest forms when suppressed can lead to explosive terminuses that are far from anything we can deem 'healthy'.

We can see the exact same extremism involved in so-called 'love'. We know about obsession or 'infatuation' and we often hear today about 'escapism' and 'projection' and 'superposition' of 'ideation' and numberless permutations of extremism of otherwise normal emotions that result in social or public 'ills'.

Someone once observed that terminal cancers often arise in people who not long prior underwent the loss of a loved one. No matter the cause of the loss, this form of death would ensue. As a result of this observation someone, I don't know who first ennuciated it, someone opined that cancer was a 'socially acceptable form of suicide.'

Chronic sadness, chronic bitterness, practiced regret . . . perhaps . . . results in a diminution of the potency of the digestive enzymes. The 'lust for life' declines. The mouth no longer waters, we lose the ability to shed tears. We stiffen, we become like stone.

We don't bow our heads in grief and wet our breasts. We do not get up and act, but retreat in utter paralysis for grief or anger. The stomach, the pancreas, the entire system shuts up. We collapse inwardly.

It is as if we say to our body: better dead or not to exist at all than continue.

And the body obeys. Or maybe it is that we starve ourselves to death.

We drink not water. We drink alcohol that evaporates and diaretically sinks water away.

We do all manner of things to 'not be' rather than articulate our objection to the universal culture of death and deathing.

Someone said no once. Maybe even more than one and many times some have said: 'no'.

And we pretend to believe.

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Art is the pinnacle of science. Science the pinnacle of knowledge. Knowledge the pinnacle of experiment. Experiment the perogative of self-awareness. Self awareness: the basis of art. <

The salaried and pay-per-hour underlings have no idea about the 'finer' issues of the business of medicine and how not only equipment costs, but supposed 'thinkers' costs in this mega-industry are in one set of books; while the other set of books keep track of actual profits.

And if you are disgusted about military budgets that can charge thousands of dollars for a screw-driver, we are about to see information about these balooned figures in some highly touted 'research' institutions like the NIH and the CDC and their cohort or subsidiary and proprietary sub-contractors supposedly pursuing 'objective research'.

Right.

And they don't know what-all's about to come down on their heads or just what they've run up against. But they suspect it and are fearful. The cold, boney finger of death is has been pointing straight out of their midst for years. Now it is turning and pointing right back at them. Forget about 'altruism', follow the money. It isn't honest and the tragedy isn't at all pretty. And people are bound to be very pissed.

They should be. Not just at the farce they've been paying through the nose for, but at their own laziness for eating it up with not the least perspicacity or looking around for themselves on issues so important as the life of the body.

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Art is the pinnacle of science. Science the pinnacle of knowledge. Knowledge the pinnacle of experiment. Experiment the perogative of self-awareness. Self awareness: the basis of art. <

Daenin Tejed.

Belive me, I'm working so hard every day not to be angry about the injustices I perceive that injure me . . . my heart.

Not to be angry. I can't do it, obviously. So please allow me to lean you kinder folk. And so, please forgive me my anger.

Happy to hear ye talk 'me' down.

Just do that, I ask. No apologies asked for, and none, I feel, required.

I can only enunciate things probatively from first-hand experiences. Want to know about that?

I'm not such an egotist as to think the answer or answers are expected or 'pre-planned' for.

In our little school, we had a saying: 'Not'.

If anyone wants more than that, talk to my tougher and meaner confreres.

WE ALL LEARN: by betters and toughers, and more long lasting wisdoms that stand before us.

You want my puny 'opinion'? Seen these really tough guys and gals helping even very 'Jesus' and 'Hercules' 'types'.

And if you think such are not 'types'? Tell me and, I presume, all other unknowers, how recent times are different from ancient times and how such differentials devolve in better 'concluscion' than a vast variety of other 'opinions'.

Do you really live by 'Faith'?

Didn't the Vikings live, too, by 'faith'?

The newest 'God', is popular and reduced to a new 'idol', because approaching closer to the facts of everyday life: we make mistakes. WE can repent. We can be forgiven. and life goes on.

I think it not fair to impose on any demonstrator of this proposition as by life in fact. So, to try and reduce such an one to slavery via kidnapping of the facts of their life to some political or religious philosophy?:

Unfair. No game. Kidnapping. Stealing. Obfuscation and even the very worst thing of all: adultery.

Just my opinion. Just my two cents. Don't come after me like some ultimately evil 'person'.

You go. You say. Say. Counter. Or by not 'countering': accede, substantiate, approve of even a faulty opinion.

Git yer self up, say: critique, mock or even denunciate.

. . . is what they say.

And believing they were wise, I find no harm in propofating further what they said. Don't blame me! Come after me, you are actually coming after stuff from far behind and long ago.

Thereby, and thus. Why would this puny child fear?

I'm not afraid. I'm confident in ye all, no matter what ye do.

[Spent the last year-and-a-half apologizing for 'blathering'. Can you just forgive me for just once BEFORE hand? Please?]

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Art is the pinnacle of science. Science the pinnacle of knowledge. Knowledge the pinnacle of experiment. Experiment the perogative of self-awareness. Self awareness: the basis of art. <