For over 40 years of working in the herbal field, I have been vocal when it comes to disseminating scientific information on herbs and in herb research. Also, I have been advocating identity and quality of herbal products during most of my professional career. My often frank and nonpolitical style might have offended some colleagues and friends. I have already offered my apologies in my memoir. But here again, my apologies
The rationale behind my arriving at “A DISRUPTIVE CONCEPT IN DRUG THERAPY” – 1st post
Background
After ephedrine and morphine were first isolated from the opium poppy and ephedra, circa 1887 and 1805 respectively, the focus on herbs have since been shifted to some of their contained chemicals. That period is what I see as the transition point of age-old herbs to new chemical drugs. Or in scientific jargon, from pharmacognosy (materia medica) to phytochemistry and related fields, with the eventual goal of obtaining from them only chemicals (drugs), not traditional herbal therapeutics.
We firmly believe the chemicals to be the herbs’ active principles and talking about them as if we are certain they represent the herbs’ traditional properties and functions. With this new scientific rationale, who needs the archaic, nonscientific herbs? However, with some hedging, we also have included some nonchemical features in the herbs so as to ‘guarantee’ the modern herbal medicines to have some traditional properties as well. But would these herb features transfer to the chemical drugs? The answer is no. But then, would they transfer to the finished herbal medicines/supplements? The answer is maybe.
We were (still are) confused. The almost century-long transition period (1805-1887) firmly established the beginning of the drug era that has finally led to the self-generating money machine (vicious cycle) that I have described throughout my books, my blog (www.ayslcorp.com/blog) and other e-publications. I believe that vicious cycle was officially sanctioned on April 11, 2017, by our FDA’s approval of the new drug, Valbenazine, for treating a drug-induced disease, Tardive Dyskinesia (or involuntary body movements), caused by the toxic side effects of common antipsychotic, antiepileptic, and gastrointestinal drugs. To me, it means now we have a closed, self-perpetuating system in which you can produce more toxic drugs, whether or not they actually work, for a particular illness/disease, which cause more new diseases that in turn, require more drugs to treat, in a perpetual toxic cycle that is controlled by people who make and sell the drugs. This is a monopoly of which our government seems to have no control and we, as citizens/consumers, have to grin and bear it. Have I described the scenario correctly? If not, please let me know.
The confusion between the following 2 facts has caused our current problems with drugs and herbs.
- Aspirin is aspirin and not another painkiller like Tylenol or morphine.
- Herbs are naturally derived medicines not too different from foods (including supplements). They are all complex natural materials. They contain not just one or two chemicals, but many, actually countless. Among the countless chemicals present in them, the majority are unknown and unidentified. Therefore, no one single chemical in these natural herbs and foods can claim to hold their properties and attributes as known and documented through millennia, which is how we know the foods we eat and the herbs we ingest.
Although we identify and assess aspirin by chemical analyses, we can’t identify food and herbs simply by their contained chemicals such as pectin or ascorbic acid in apple and call either chemical ‘apple,’ nor can we analyze ginseng’s ginsenosides among many other chemicals also present (e.g., sterols, choline & oleanolic acid) and call any one particular chemical or group of chemicals ‘ginseng.’ Yet we have been doing just that for the past many decades.
This seems to have quietly surfaced, but unresolved, over the recent 25 years after the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, DSHEA, was passed in 1994. We regulate herbal supplements as food but from day one we treated (tested) them as drugs, requiring them to meet some chemical standards. This obviously hasn’t worked, because we can’t simply select any chemical in an herb and call that chemical the herb, such as calling chlorogenic acid in echinacea, ‘echinacea,’ or pectin in apple, ‘apple.’ But that is exactly what we have been trying to do, without getting the expected results. We seemed not to have grasped the fact that drugs and herbs are very different and continue to mix up the two. Thus, with drugs, we use an aspirin standard for the identification, quality control, and manufacture of aspirin, but not for another painkiller like morphine. Yet, for lack of any appropriate herbal standards, we have basically been using ambiguous and inappropriate herb standards (based on some chemical out of possibly hundreds or thousands others also present) and try to apply drug technology on herbs. It is analogous to using an aspirin standard for any painkiller (aspirin, acetaminophen, or morphine). This is not going to happen, as scientific technologies for drugs are well established. We know this doesn’t work. Any scientist knows that. But scientists working on herbs often view herb standards (we call them reference materials) as a single entity like a chemical standard. To them, chlorogenic acid in echinacea is as good as echinacea and caffeine in coffee is as good as coffee to them. Hence, none of the current herb reference materials can address this inadequacy and major problem. And I am only talking about the raw herbs! With the finished herbal products on the market, there are no legal requirements what they should be. Consequently, adulteration and imitations are common. For an example, see “Chapter 9: Adulteration Continues to be a Major Problem” of my memoir (My Life & Rollercoaster Career”).
My group working in my laboratory under my direction had developed the RBRM (Representative Botanical Reference Materials) over 14 years ago as a key part of our Phyto-True system, but only last year did we receive a patent from the European Patent Office, 10 years after we submitted our patent application. [see another earlier post on this blog] Since then, this has received increasing interest. I think this may finally be the watershed in the introduction of true herbal supplements/medicines to modern health care, after enough of our general public is introduced to this concept and like the idea.
Nevertheless, this is just the beginning. But we can change the status quo and finally achieve better natural health with a more holistic approach, more in conformance with foods than individual chemicals. I trust our younger generations with bright brains, and without preconditioned prejudice, can apply new and appropriate sciences to break the vicious cycle and to treat herbs more like foods to match the imprecision and chaos they encounter, which is our complex body.
Posted 4/25/19 – 7:29pm