After 80 plus years of monopolizing a major part of our healthcare, our synthetic drug-therapy has not worked out as expected or hoped. The drug part is scientific with all the elegance of chemical synthesis, separation, and purification techniques, along with in vitro and in vivo testing. But once this drug enters our body, it is simply trial and error, no more scientific than any herbal medicine that had gone through the same trial-and-error process, except umpteen years earlier.
I believe the major problem that has prevented drug-therapy from making any breakthroughs in cancer, heart disease or other diseases is our failure to address the fundamental issue of our complex body and the time it would take it to accept a totally brand-new synthetic chemical it has never met during its eons of existence as a part of our human species. We must address this problem before any continuing efforts in drug therapy can be successful. For those colleagues and friends who want to know more about synthetic versus natural chemicals in the drug-therapy process so as to understand how this works, it is discussed throughout my books and my posts on my blog, especially regarding the impurities of these synthetic chemicals which are mostly (if not all) brand-new chemicals with totally unknown properties. If this issue is not satisfactorily addressed, we would be doing the same scientific research for another 50 years and still be in the VC, with drug companies continuing to make whatever profits they want and we are still walking around with all these toxic chemicals in our body causing chaos, leading to illnesses.
Basically, we still haven’t broken through the constrain of time nor simplified our infinitely complex body into manageable entities (molecular, cellular, etc.) that would accept brand-new, potentially highly toxic chemicals from petrochemicals or those derived therefrom during synthesis. At the present, the brand-new drug and one or more of its equally brand-new (and potentially highly toxic) chemicals present as impurities that are not totally removed during purification, may be rejected by our body’s resident chemicals, cells, or tissues. Or we can develop the technology of tagging each drug molecule with a homing device to avoid bumping into them so that the drug molecule can go directly to its targeted molecule or cell to neutralize the problem. Even so, we still have the basic issue of the uncontrollable time to overcome.
Despite the fact we now know most of the molecular and cellular details of our body and their interactions, often with great precision, we don’t know how to put all these advanced scientific achievements and know-how to make us healthy. I have my thoughts on these, and I think self-interest, national interest, greed, and the 2 uncontrollable elements of time and our complex body in the drug-therapy process all seem to play a role in such endeavors.
I think the reason we were able to land 2 astronauts (Neil Armstrong & Buzz Aldrin) on the moon in 1969, less than a decade after President John F. Kennedy declared in 1961 that we would send humans there, is because it was a government project and we had our patriotic and proud country behind it. On the other hand, after President Nixon declared war on cancer in 1971, we are now close to 2020, almost half-a-century later or 6 times longer than what it had taken us to put someone on the moon, we still have no clue when cancer can be even reduced in incidence and type. Instead, cancer chemotherapy is now part of the VC. Which means, like all synthetic drugs in it, they can be highly toxic and cause more cancers than it ‘eliminates’ (if such a concept is feasible). Unlike the moon-landing project, this drug-therapy endeavor is more driven by personal greed and anticipations of large profits than by patriotism or national pride. Furthermore, in drug-therapy, there are the 2 uncontrollable elements (time & body) that we didn’t have to deal with in the space-travel project. There also doesn’t seem to a clear goal with a roadmap to achieve it, just a vague idea of ‘health.’ Now that the VC has firmly established itself, what incentives do drug makers have to set the goal or define one? Since continuing whatever they have already been doing has fulfilled any money-worshipper’s dream, i.e., perpetual big financial returns whether or not the products they produce work for anyone. If their drugs don’t work and are toxic enough to produce more diseases as side benefits for their current VC, so much more money for them. It has nothing beneficial for any of us who are not part owners of this VC or for those who have chosen to be outside it. Only Big Pharma and their associates gain.
The way I see it, the only way to break the VC is to publicize it so that the general public would know about its potential harm to our future generations and take action before it would land in their lap in a couple of decades. Hopefully, enough of you younger folks out there will help me help you start breaking this VC while at the same time bypassing it in an alternative parallel path.
This would require us to use future technologies that we can’t even visualize with our current scientific mind. It is also possible that the appropriate technology is already around the corner in an area totally outside our life sciences field. It just needs some outside-of-the-box thinkers to recognize it, be they scientists or laymen. It probably will have little or nothing to do with our current chemical or biological technologies. The technologies would probably be far-out, metaphysical, magnetic, or whatever that we, as chemists, microbiologists, or herbalists, cannot visualize at the present. They can somehow cross the time barrier or allow our future generations to put homing devices on our drugs which would allow them to bypass all other resident molecules in our body to directly reach their end targets, without bumping into them to cause havoc, and to resolve the problem. But the process still is constrained by time. Hopefully this would not take another 50 years, because by then our human species could probably start to mutate into freaks, after so many more decades being continually bombarded by these toxic synthetic drugs in the VC, with all the incentives for its owners not to change anything, unless forced to. Who would? When you had finally created a ‘fountain of gold’ that is self-sustaining!
For my part, my expertise is in the identity, quality, and the manufacture of commercial herbal products, as well as the potential biotech production of useful natural chemicals such as psilocybin and its analogs (baeocystin & norbaeocystin, monomethyl- and demethyl-analogs of psilocybin). As a graduate student at Michigan, I had the pleasure to name both analogs after isolating them from the mycelium of a hallucinogenic mushroom, Psilocybe baeocystis, from our Pacific Northwest, grown in a home-made fermentor. As I have explained in my books and online posts, even 2 identical chemicals can be different in their pharmacological properties, depending on their purity – 100.00%, 98.00%, or 95.00%. The amount of impurities can make a lot of difference in a drug. If it is synthetic, its impurities are unknown and can be toxic because they are brand-new to our planet and our body has had no prior contact with them. On the other hand, whatever impurities a natural chemical has, after being isolated from a plant material, were already existing in nature together with this chemical; they are not something brand-new coming from nowhere. If you think you can have a chemical like psilocybin or cannabidiol (CBD) synthesized and expect either to be the same chemical, think again. Their impurities may make a big difference depending on whether they are natural (isolated from nature) or synthetic (produced from petrochemicals or other potential toxic chemicals). If produced by biotech, the fungus or other plant materials are simply grown in a controlled nutrients environment, changing their nature and amount until the desired chemicals are induced to produce their maximal yield. Then we harvest the plant tissue (mycelium for mushroom) and isolate from it the target chemicals. Whatever impurities still remaining in the purified chemicals, normally 2%, 5%, or even up to 20%, are from the plant material, none is totally unknown and brand-new to us like those in a synthetic drug.
For another example of a natural chemical, levodopa, useful in treating a rather common disease nowadays, Parkinson’s disease (I think it’s often drug induced), see “Chapter 4: Adulthood in America” of “My Life & Rollercoaster Career” pp. 94-97. The section, titled “Levodopa extraction as example of thinking outside the box” describes how I developed a very simple process for extracting levodopa (>90% purity) over a period of only a few weeks. I hope someone has been using it for levodopa or at least its rationale for other natural chemicals.
I’ll do my little part in trying to improve the identity and quality of herb supplements currently on the market, while simultaneously trying to afford consumers true and good-quality herbal supplements at affordable prices, preferably from consumer-funded manufacturers. I don’t expect to live to see this situation in the herbal industry totally changed or the vicious cycle broken. But I am hopeful I can help build the foundation for my millennial colleagues and friends to carry on and to pass down to their next generations. With the hemp and CBD industry now so hyped up, it reminds me of the herbal supplements industry at its beginning around 25 years ago. Since then, the key scientists in government, industry, and academia have taken the lead in using faux science on herbs, analyzing herbal supplements as if they were drugs and expect them to meet drug standards. Now, all these years later, we still have no reasonable standards for herbal supplements. As I have described this repeatedly in my books and posts online (including my article “A Disruptive Concept…” mentioned above, two ‘herbal supplements’ from different companies, with the exact same herbal ingredients on their labels, can be drastically different. [See Chapters 9, 11, & 12 of my book, “My Life & Rollercoaster Career”] This shouldn’t be. But it is the fact.
With CBD products, I am afraid it may be the same. I hope my millennial colleagues and those even younger won’t follow the example of us old farts (pardon my French!) many of us, no matter how politically and socially connected, hence famous, don’t seem to get it straight all these years, confusing herbs with drugs, making it easy for the bad apples to cheat and profit from the confusion. As an advocate of traditional Chinese herbs, it saddens me to see even the United States Pharmacopeia and the Chinese Pharmacopoeia had set recent standards of traditional Chinese medicines based on some arbitrary chemicals as the standard and not on traditional attributes resulting from processing through traditional methods practiced over millennia. A typical example is cured fo-ti (zhiheshouwu or cured Polygonum multiflorum root), a well-known Chinese antiaging tonic. The chemical, a close relative of resveratrol (a strong antioxidant) is called tetrahydroxystilbene. It may have antioxidant properties, but has never been shown to be antiaging. This is discussed in the Introduction of my book mentioned earlier.
Once, when I was actively involved in the ‘modernization’ of Chinese medicine among mostly commercial, profit-oriented Chinese colleagues about 20 years ago, I asked a top executive of the USP why they only used ginsenosides as standards for ginseng (Chinese & American), his answer was “market pressure.” Since then, the Chinese Pharmacopoeia also yielded to the same market pressure. I believe the new standards for cured fo-ti in the Chinese Pharmacopoeia 2005 was the result of this mentality. And the herbal suppliers’ market carries some highly purified ‘herbal’ extracts containing high concentrations of such chemicals (e.g., 98% resveratrol) for use in ‘herbal’ products standardized to these chemicals, which contain little or no herbal elements. Now, it seems I am the only one again who is speaking out.
To my highly knowledgeable colleagues in drugs or alternative areas, especially herbs, why are you so silent, even now? We don’t have that much time anymore. By now, as highly knowledgeable scientists, you must already have some inkling that our drug endeavors haven’t worked for our health. We definitely can’t waste anther 50 or 80 more years doing the same failed research. If you have your own ideas that are better than mine on this VC, please let’s hear about them. I am sure you don’t want your children and grandchildren to inherit this vicious cycle in only a few decades, unless you happen to be part owners of the VC. Please support me and buy my book if you love your children and grandchildren, or humanity and our environment. My book, “My Life & Rollercoaster Career” is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble; and my article “A Disruptive Concept in Drug Therapy” is on LinkedIn and my blog: www.ayslcorp.com/blog.
I wish you all good health and, ideally, optimal natural health without drugs!
Sorry this post has taken so long.
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