Month: May 2019

Modernized natural alternatives and natural replacements for toxic synthetic drugs

I was born and raised in Hong Kong in a family with a TCM tradition, using only Chinese medicines until I was in my teens.  Being a kid with a short attention span, I flunked out of elementary school and then again out of high school, in what is equivalent to our sophomore year here, after failing 3 or 4 subjects (one of which was music, basically singing in front of my class).  I then skipped a grade, graduated from another high school with honors, and went to Taiwan to attend the National Taiwan University.  There, I earned a B.S. degree in pharmacy, doing exceptionally well in pharmacognosy.  When I applied to 2 universities in the U.S. to pursue graduate studies, the University of Michigan accepted me and also offered me a teaching assistantship.  Who could turn that down?  So, I was there in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for 5 years before getting a PhD in Pharmacognosy (study of natural drugs).  After finishing my studies in Michigan, at the time, teaching opportunities for Asian students were few, my advisor found me a postdoctoral position at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center to work on the biosynthesis of opium alkaloids and the isolation of new opioids from the opium poppy plant.  That basically started my rollercoaster career for more than 50 years – from natural-product chemist, entrepreneur, salesman, chief research microbiologist in single-cell protein production from petroleum, director of R&D in herbal extraction, owner and director of several companies in the research and production of herbal products (supplements) specializing in Chinese herbs, and then principal investigator of an SBIR database contract awarded by the National Cancer Institute, to principal investigator of an SBIR grant from NCCAM, NIH, on herb identification and standardization, etc.

My point in telling you all these (mostly already covered in my books), is that, being outside of the academic circle for a person like me, would probably give me a unique perspective not gained if I had been in a stable, tenured academic position.  This varied real-life experience in seeing how herbs and drugs actually being promoted to, and used by, the general public over the past 50 years has given me new perspectives on our health and healthcare (more realistically, sick-care). 

      I grew up using herbs and have personally experienced their beneficial effects.  I probably didn’t take any drugs for anything until I was in my teens.  There was no reason to, because I was seldom sick, probably due to the absence of synthetic drugs in my body at that time which would otherwise wreak havoc to my immune system.  We never used disinfectant wipes, ate antibiotic-laden meat, or had doctors give us antibiotics whenever we had a cold.  But one thing I distinctly remember when I got the flu (Asian flu pandemic 1967-68) at college in Taiwan after watching a track meet in light-rainy weather without an umbrella for hours.  I was in bed for 2 weeks and lost 20 pounds that I didn’t gain back until years after I was married.  While in bed lying down, I was fine and could chat with my roommates with no problem.  But when I tried to sit up, my head began to spin, which went away as soon as I lay down again.  I assume I was given some modern drugs.  But the most memorable is what they gave me to relieve my terrible cough.  It was an extract of jiegeng (root of Platycodon grandiflorum or balloon flower) made in our school dispensary in glass percolators.  After taking that, my cough went away overnight. 

      Then decades later, while I was sourcing Siberian ginseng (eleuthero) and Schisandra in northeastern China for one of my products, guided by my supplier-friends, Sammy Ma and his brother, I came across jiegeng again, this time as a dish of root vegetable at one of our dinners there.  This just shows us that the origin of our medicine often has a common root with food.  Our age-old experience with it through trial-and-error guarantees it as safe and effective.  Unfortunately, many of us have forgotten our root.  Instead of producing safe and nontoxic drugs, we have somehow created the vicious cycle, that generates side effects and new diseases for the general public but is a perpetual money-making machine for pharmaceutical companies and their associates with total impunity, no matter what they produce.  How depressing!

In my next post, I’ll tell you my plan to address the following issues: (1) expose fake herbal supplements without herbs, so that consumers can avoid those and switch to genuine ones; (2) modernized natural remedies with safe-use records that are accompanied by meaningful fingerprints of identity and quality; and (3) more natural chemical drugs, and how to avoid their synthetic counterparts.

Toxicity of synthetic drugs vs. natural chemicals

Natural chemicals have always been with us since human life began. We might not know them but they are in the foods we eat and the herbs we ingest when we are ill. 

Synthetic chemicals are made mostly from petroleum chemicals.  We have no long history of intimate contact with them and don’t know whether or not they are edible or poisonous.

We know two chemicals with the same chemical structure are indeed the same chemical, whether they are synthetic or natural.  However, the synthetic chemicals are mostly made from brand-new ones.  Even though some may have been synthesized from natural compounds, their final product and the various intermediates as well as byproducts formed during the synthetic process, are brand new.  When we attempt to purify the end product, we try to remove as much as possible these brand-new, potentially very toxic, intermediates and byproducts.  Despite our advanced scientific technologies, I am not aware of our being able to remove every single molecule of these unwanted compounds we call impurities, from our drugs.  Nor do I know of any drug-development organizations testing the toxicity of every one of these impurities as they do with drugs.  If I am wrong, would someone knowledgeable please correct me?

                      With natural chemicals, we don’t have this problem, because whatever impurities present have already been there with the isolated chemical since antiquity, before and after it is extracted.  Take psilocybin, for example, other compounds (such as psilocin, baeocystin & norbaeocystin, among others) may already be present, before and after the psilocybin is isolated from the mushroom. 

                      However, in synthetic psilocybin, whatever compounds present with it as impurities, are brand new to this planet.  Thus, its safety is totally unknown.

                      Incidentally, no chemical, natural or synthetic, is 100.00% pure except theoretically. In practice, the percentage of impurities allowed in pharmacopoeias such as the USP, range from maybe 1% to 10% or higher.  The lower level usually is reserved for synthetics and the higher one reserved for naturals. I am not sure if those levels have been set because USP scientists knew synthetics are unknown hence their safety too, so restrict it to a lower limit; but natural chemicals are present along with our foods and herbs since antiquity and hence have at least some safety record.  These numbers also make allowance for the precision of the measuring equipment used.  I know USP tests certain impurities in drugs, allowing them to be present in trace amounts.  But I don’t know if there are any human safety records for the impurities in synthetic drugs.  Does anyone knowledgeable in these matters know?

                      I don’t know about other drugs, but I believe psilocybin can be obtained by biotechnology, or simply stated, ‘fermentation.’  I spent 5 years in graduate school over 50 years ago developing the method which proves it is feasible.  My work has been published in several papers in scientific journals.  Whoever involved in this business with foresight and compassion for consumers, trying to afford them non-toxic psilocybin, can take up the project.  Years of preliminary R&D work can be eliminated.  In addition, baeocystin and norbaeocystin are an added bonus, because sooner or later these 2 compounds will be proven similar or even better than psilocybin in mental healthcare.  Good luck to you all! 

This post is primarily addressed to our younger folks who have not created the vicious cycle.   We the older generations are the ones who have done it or been brainwashed to believe in drugs and accept them.  Hence, we are of not much help to be in charge of breaking the vicious cycle for you, as it’d be like leaving the fox to guard the henhouse. 

Is the vicious cycle of toxic drugs anyone’s fault?

I believe it was negligence in the beginning.  We have been treating our body as a visually single entity after the modern drug era began over a century ago. Then, since the passage of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act in 1994, we have been treating (testing) herbal supplements/medicines using the wrong scientific technologies well established for chemical drugs, but not suitable for herbs.  Consequently, over the past several decades, the above two actions have skewed most, if not all, of the results of scientific research involving herbs, such as the identity and quality of herbal products.  These have led the mainstream drug scientists to declare traditional herbal therapy is anecdotal and unscientific, but modern drug therapy is ‘evidence-based’ and scientific.   However, both are not scientific.   These are already discussed and documented in my publications (print and online), especially those of the last three years.  If you have followed my newsletter or blog, you would probably realize I didn’t really piece together the connection between the identity and quality of herbal products, our body, and how the drug vicious cycle began to evolve when synthetic drugs entered our complex body to cause havoc, until about 16 years ago.   Therefore, I think the vicious cycle may not be anybody’s fault.  Unless the drug makers had already known about it decades earlier and kept it quiet until I happened to discover it. This interaction of drugs and our complex body causing major disturbances in it is described recently in the article “A Disruptive Concept in Drug Therapy” which you can find in its entirety on the April 2, 2019 post.           

However, after the first new drug, Valbenazine (Ingrezza), was approved on April 11, 2017, for treating the first drug-caused disease called Tardive Dyskinesia (involuntary body movements), I see it simply as a gift from our government, that means you and me, giving pharmaceutical companies a free hand to continue making toxic drugs with official sanction of their vicious cycle.  The drug scientists might not even have thought of it and how it came about, but on April 11, 2017, an amazing business opportunity fell on their lap, after decades of their priming of consumers and government health officials that we needed their ‘scientific’ drug therapy.   Yet no drugs, whether old or new, have ever been seriously held accountable, because no one honestly knew what was going to happen once these new drugs entered our body.  Our body does what it does since antiquity and we simply can’t control it.  Otherwise we would have all kinds of human health problems under control.  Instead, after decades of sophisticated scientific drug research, we have this vicious cycle and no idea what our body would do to a brand-new drug.  Do you think our scientists really have control of our drug-therapy process? We produce one drug for some illness, but we never know what it finally does, all depending on what our body makes it do, or not do, after it enters it.  For example, the drug Thalidomide was developed as a sedative and hypnotic but was found to be good also for respiratory infections as well as morning sickness.   After pregnant women using it and gave birth to babies with missing limps, hands, and other deformities (“Thalidomide babies”) in the 1960’s, it was removed from the market.  Then, only in recent years, it has been resurrected as a treatment for leprosy and cancer (multiple myeloma).  This strengthens my observation that modern drug therapy is not scientific.  It is just a trial-and-error process like the practice of traditional herbal medicine, except that all the impurities in herbs have been with us since human life began, while those in synthetic drugs are brand new.  With these brand-new chemicals, our real experience with them starts only after their 10-20 years of clinical trial, when they are approved for use in humans.  Incidentally, Thalidomde was supposed to be an immunomodulating drug.  A lot of Chinese tonic herbs have immunomodulating properties, such as astragalus and lycium (goji).  Could it be that Thalidomide was resurrected for treating multiple myeloma because of its immunomodulating properties exhibited in lab tests but never been shown in humans as with Chinese tonics?   

           Regardless, now we have a situation.  For millennia, we have needed and used herbs for our illnesses, and they have kept us alive and well.  Then, only in the short period of 200 years after the modern-drug era began, many of these herbal medicines have been discarded and rapidly replaced by modern synthetic chemicals.  The herbs (like foods) have been with us since human life began.  We know what is safe and what can kill from our long human-use experience. We don’t need to start testing them as with brand-new synthetic chemicals.  However, we have been artificially producing such chemicals from petrochemicals that we seldom, if ever, try to eat or drink, because they are most likely toxic to begin with.  The chemical/drug thus produced is always accompanied by other chemicals, such as reagents, intermediates, and byproducts from the synthetic process.  Even after purification trying to get rid of these, some of which still persist in small amounts as impurities in the ‘pure’ drug to cause trouble (see the previous post, 4^th Post).  Could Thalidomide’s toxic effects be due to its hidden impurities that caused the birth defects? 

While the vicious cycle appears to be nobody’s fault, the pharmaceutical companies certainly did not hide their greed after the first drug, Valbenazine (Ingrezza), was approved.  Its first owner wastes no time to take advantage of this official vicious cycle by charging each patient (ultimately our healthcare system) $200/day or $73,000/year.  Considering this new drug-caused disease occurring in more than 500,000 people in the US, imagine how much money this company will quietly take from us U.S. taxpayers yearly, with our implicit permission – tens of billion dollars!   This is just the beginning and only the first drug!  I don’t think the other drug makers will be less greedy, because after the vicious drug cycle was firmly established, it already has us trapped in it.   Our government, after so many decades of manipulation by the drug industry, does not know how to deal with it.  The politicians continue to pay lip service and bicker among themselves. They may not even know that this vicious cycle exists and expect future drugs to be better and not more toxic in intensity and in number.  The other politicians may simply think that businesses are entitled to decent profits, totally unaware that this is not a regular business.  We now have an industry that has a license to make and sell any drugs and charge us any prices they want with absolute impunity, whether or not these products work.  When some patient dies, they blame the death on anything but themselves and their drugs, and they can get away with it.  With any other products (cars, planes, home appliances, etc.) that have so many defects, resulting in hurting or killing people, or simply annoying them, they would be shunned by consumers and their manufacturers would be bankrupt in no time.  Yet, because of the complexity of drug development and therapy, involving common sense and different kinds of sciences, few if anyone in government have the training and experience to dare question the drug industry’s practice, especially when it deals with our health.  My generation and the one that follows have been bombarded by drug ads for 4 decades.  Many of us have been brain-washed by these ads to believe in drugs or at least find them not objectionable, especially when you consider our scientific advances in other medical areas, such as hip replacement, tooth implants, ‘bionic’ limbs, and other types of surgery that save lives, with dramatic and visible results.  

Few of us have the upbringing, training, and experience in diverse fields to recognize what is wrong with our drug-therapy system.  I have been in this field for over 55 years, yet I didn’t see anything wrong with drugs myself until only about 16 years ago.  I believe you, our younger folks, should know about this so that I can help you break this vicious cycle before it will be too late.

 I have a young granddaughter.  I want her and other young people to grow up to have a true natural alternative to this vicious cycle of only toxic drugs which gives the drug industry absolutely no incentive to produce safer, cheaper and better drugs.  The two things that I most worry for you, which you will inherit from us, are: (1) our ruined (or about to be ruined) environment; and (2) the toxic vicious drug cycle.  Neither is due to any fault of yours.  Both are caused by the greed of a minute percentage of our older generations.    Because of our current dysfunctional, and sometimes downright corrupt political system, I don’t trust my own generation, or the next, to solve either problem for you.   Since I am no expert in environmental matters, I hope someone else would help you with our environment.  But I’ll try my best to break the toxic vicious cycle for you so that you won’t be stuck forever with only toxic drug therapy. 

I am a private person.  Seldom, if ever, have I engaged in self-promotion.  This is the first time I openly ask you to at least lend moral support to my project, even though it is really for the benefit of your generations, including the grandchildren of my generation and theirs.  I plan on using 75% of the gross profits from the sales of my 2 latest books, and one more on its way, to start a nonprofit to work towards breaking the vicious cycle and to afford true natural alternatives to the current toxic drugs. I am an herbal scientist, experienced in the quality and  manufacture of herbal products, among other things.  So, I’m not just talking.   I am simply asking you to spread the word on my books, buy one of them if you can, and tell others about them

Also, I especially need the help of you millennial folks (teens to 40’s), for your savviness in social media to spread the word.  You are the ones who will inherit this earth from us, hopefully still not totally ruined.  This vicious cycle is time-sensitive.  As time goes on, it continues to remove from you what limited potential alternatives that are still left, simultaneously adding more toxic drugs that continue to cause new diseases.  In another 20 years, you would have no alternatives but toxic drug therapy at whatever prices demanded by a few ‘gazillionaires’ who would perpetuate and control this vicious cycle that to them, is a self-generating money machine that we have unwittingly gifted them.

This fight will be yours.  But I have faith in you after seeing a sample of your strength and intelligence following the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida.  Hang in there!  I believe your generation can do it!

In my next post, the 6^th on this same series, I’ll describe how we can save traditional herbal medicines as alternatives and/or complementary medicines to toxic drugs and how the vicious cycle can be broken.  Also, natural drugs can stay natural as some of them can be produced by biotechnology, not via chemical synthesis of unknown chemicals never before existed on our planet.

1. See 3rd post.
2. Natural therapeutics (herbs, foods, etc.).  They include natural materials from plants, animals, minerals, and microbes (mushrooms included), among others.  But they don’t include drugs produced by synthesis which invariably carry with them toxic impurities that include intermediates, toxic reagents, and/or byproducts that are hidden in the ‘pure’ chemical drugs, normally expressed as 98% to 102% purity, which is never 100.00% pure.  I have discussed the issue of toxic impurities hidden in modern synthetic drugs in my books and other writings, such as online, on my blog.   I don’t believe these impurities (no matter in what quantities present) have ever been tested in humans.  If you have contrary information, I’d love to hear from you. These might have been tested on receptors or small animals, and then the results were projected onto humans.  Testing them on some isolated receptors, chemicals, or cells in vivo certainly doesn’t translate onto our living and extremely organized and well-functioning body.  This reminds me of Dr. Albert Hofmann.   He was the famous chemist at Sandoz of Switzerland who, 50 years ago, was the first to have isolated the hallucinogen, psilocybin, from a Magic Mushroom of Mexico.  At the time I was a graduate student at Michigan, Ann Arbor, working on cultivating a North American hallucinogenic mushroom (Psilocybe baeocystis) in submerged culture and isolating 2 new sister compounds of psilocybin from its fungal tissue, whose chemical structures I determined and named baeocystin & norbaeocystin.   I met Dr. Hofmann a couple of times at meetings or conferences and remember his story of trying a tiny little bit of a synthetic compound that he had synthesized, shortly before he went home one day.  That chemical was LSD!  He certainly had an unexpected trip riding home on his bicycle that day!   What I am trying to say is there are two major systems of discovering and developing therapeutics – the scientific but uncertain way and the human empirical, trial-and-true way.  What Dr. Hofmann took was maybe only micrograms of LSD, but that would be enough to give him a trip.  The chemical (ergotamine) from which he synthesized the LSD is a drug for migraine and related headaches used in doses of a few milligrams (or thousands of micrograms) each time.  The LSD made from it has much stronger effects in a different way, not necessarily in relieving migraine.  I believe the in vitro and in vivo testing microcosm won’t be able to predict that effect, nor will it work as well as actual human experience.  Only time will tell.  However, for natural therapeutics, our herbs and foods have already gone through the tried-and-true process.   The fact that we know what herbs or foods are safe to eat should serve as evidence that the process for natural therapeutics is far ahead of the modern ‘scientific’ process.    For synthetic drugs, we won’t have the verdict for who knows how long, decades, centuries, or millennia?  Shouldn’t we reset our thinking in modern drug discovery and development?  And start looking at traditional medicines that have already gone through the process, not just for 2 or 3 decades, but for millennia?  Using natural therapeutics can start to complement our current toxic drugs and help mitigate their toxic effects.  To my drug colleagues, please point out what you see as wrong in my thinking in terms of science and common sense.  To be clear and impartial in your thinking, please temporarily step outside the vicious cycle of drugs (which financially benefits only the greedy) and put yourself in the shoes of the health- and financially oppressed public.  

          There are two subgroups of natural therapeutics within the herb/food domain.  They are tonics and fashi or fawu (or food ‘taboos’).  Many people outside of China may have heard of tonic herbs, but few may know what they mean.  Tonic herbs are loosely defined as natural materials, mostly botanicals, that double as both medicine and food, depending on usage.  Thus, ginseng tea (Asian or American) can be drunk either as a medicine or simply as a beverage.  Same with astragalus root, goji berries, Schisandra berries, and danggui (Chinese angelica root).  They can be taken as medicine or as food.  From modern research performed over recent decades, these tonic herbs all have some the following biological functions – antioxidant, immune-system modulating, anti-inflammatory, and anti-allergic, among others.  These and their formulas have been often described in my latest book, My Life & Rollercoaster Career.  

      The other subgroup consists of mostly foods and tonic herbs that are generally used as foods with certain other specific foods.  While my sisters and I were growing up under Grandma’s traditional medical care, we learned the very basics of Chinese medicine, including cooling versus warming herbs, yin versus yang herbs, detoxifying herbs, tonic herbs, and what to use in warm or qi-deficient conditions, among others.   There are some herbs and foods that should not be used with one another.  For a more detailed description, read pp. 228-229 of my My Life & Rollercoaster Career (from my newsletter, Issue 5, January 1997) reproduced below:        

 

A NOTE FROM DR. LEUNG

One of the things I learned while growing up in a cosmopolitan city like Hong Kong is the contrast between East and West in treating illnesses. We learned early on that illnesses are closely related to our diet. When we are ill, we need to watch what we take into our body. For example, according to Cantonese tradition, if one has a fever or a “hot” condition (such as canker sores, blood-shot eyes, bad breath and dry and hoarse throat), one should avoid warming foods or herbs, such as lamb, beef, Asian ginseng, chili pepper, cinnamon, and other strong spices. On the other hand, cooling foods or herbs are just what one needs for such a condition, which include American ginseng, watercress, kudzu root, mung bean, and bean curd. In contrast, when one is treated by modern Western medicine, except on extremely rare occasions, one is allowed to eat anything because modern medicine does not believe in food taboos as they have no “scientific” rationale. Since I have grown up in a traditional Chinese environment and received a solid Western scientific education, I have always been torn between tradition and science regarding this issue. We rarely took any modern drugs while we were growing up but on the few occasions that I did, I wholeheartedly endorsed the Western way because it allowed me to eat my favorite foods. I was certainly guilty of expediency. But I was young. For a long while, up until several years after I obtained my doctorate, I leaned towards modern medicine, even though all the time my traditional upbringing was prominent in the back of my mind. Then, as I learned more about the deficiencies of modern medicine and of drug treatment, the voice of my background and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) started to speak louder to me. Now, I am convinced that both conventional Western medicine and TCM have strong points and weak points and they can coexist to serve us well. Nevertheless, I have a healthy skepticism towards both systems, especially when proponents of each often try to outdo the other. But in reality, there is no need to do so, as there is plenty of room for each to exercise its good. Getting back to food taboos. I think it won’t hurt for one to be open minded about it. Here is a little “scientific evidence” I recently came across in my files to support food taboos.³⁰ It is by no means a quality report, but the results intrigued me.

In a brief report from the Department of Surgery of Jiaxing Municipal No. 1 Hospital of Zhejiang Province, the incidence of postoperative infection was evaluated among 4,357 patients who underwent surgery between 1978 and 1982. Among the 2,171 patients who observed food taboos, i.e., eating only mild and plain foods and not eating so-called fashi or fawu (nutritious foods that cause the “flare up” of certain diseased conditions, such as chicken soup, fish, shrimp, crab, mutton, green onions, and jiucai or Allium odorum), only 71 had infections. In contrast, among the 2,186 patients who maintained a normal diet after surgery, 191 had experienced infections. The difference was almost threefold! I personally think it is worthwhile to investigate this type of food taboo further in a more controlled manner. And I don’t think it is difficult to design a good protocol for this either. After all, the terms fashi and fawu are not recently made-up terms; they have been around for centuries, a result of practical human experience with diet and diseases.³¹ According to Chinese diet taboos, “nutritious” foods (yes, chicken soup included!) do not necessarily suit all occasions; some actually aggravate certain diseased conditions. This is something modern nutritionists should heed.

---

30.  J .J. Ying et al., “The Clinical Significance of Food Taboos in Surgery,” Zhongxiyi Jiehe Zazhi, 5(7): 439(1985).

31.  J Huang, “Preliminary Evaluation of Fawu,” Zhongguo Zhongyao Zazhi, 17(9): 563-565(1992).