The Green Pharmacy

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At a time when the entire Western world is looking forward - to a new year, a new century, a new millennium - I'd like to challenge this nation's physicians and pharmacists to do just the opposite: look back. It's my belief that the future of medicine is rooted in the past, before chemists undertook to synthesize synthetic silver bullets for all that ails, and before pharmaceutical companies hitched our collective health to what has become for them a multibillion-dollar wagon.

I've spent close to 40 years (most of those in the employ of the United States Department of Agriculture) investigating the medicinal properties of plants, sampling most everything green from the north woods of Maine to the south woods of sweet home Alabama and from Amazonia to Africa, Asia and Australia. What I've learned has convinced me that modern medicine's blind faith in pharmaceutical "smart missiles" - drugs designed to strike narrowly defined disease target can oft times be misguided. I were a betting man, I'd put my money on the herbal alternative to be cheaper, safer and overall better for you than its synthetic counterpart. Trouble is, doctors, drug companies, even the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have so far seemed unwilling to take that bet.

Open most any issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and you'll read about comparative head-on trials of various drugs: Hytrin ® versus Proscar ® for benign prostatic hypertrophy (enlarged prostate), dihydroergotamine versus sumatriptan for acute migraine and .so on. Omitted from virtually all of these studies, however, is any consideration of the herbal alternatives, regardless of their potential.

The National Cancer Institute is even now funding a comparison of the drugs tamoxifen and raloxifene to see which is the better breast cancer preventative. Never mind that tamoxifen increases a woman's risk for uterine cancer and blood clots. Meanwhile, the American Cancer Society (ACS) continues to insist that there's no proof that any food or diet helps. How can it know? Until tamoxifen and raloxifene are compared to standardized bean soup (40 milligrams of isoflavones per cup) and/or to kudzu (our best source of the natural phyto estrogen, daidzein) no one knows for sure - not you, me or the ACS.

Likewise, we can't know whether or not red beans and kudzu are, as I suspect, effective at warding off osteoporosis (though it's interesting to note that the pharmaceutical alternative. ipriflavone, is convened to daidzen in the stomach.) What I do know is that if I exercise enough growing my red beans and picking my kudzu, I just might prevent osteoporosis.

I'm also rather convinced that, when it comes to combating migraines, oral feverfew, even with its own potential side effects (i.e., canker sores, gastrointestinal distress), is safer, if not more effi cacious - at least at prevention, and prevention is better than cure - than either of the leading, competing pharmaceuticals. Still, it'd be nice to have the clinical data to prove it. A 1996 study sponsored in part by Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, showed dihydroergota mine (a Sandoz product) to be better than its competitor, sumatriptan. How easy and what good public relations it would have been for Sandoz to include the cheaper herbal alternative, standardized feverfew extract, in its study for the benefit of the more than 43 million uninsured Americans for whom conventional pharmaceuticals are priced out of reach. If feverfew proved safe and even modestly efficacious, Sandoz and America would be all the better off.