The Green Pharmacy

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My faith in what I have come to call the "Green Pharmacy" is tied to the shared dependence that all of life -human, animal and plant - has on chlorophyll, the molecular powerhouse that drives the process of photosynthesis. Chlorophyll enables plants to turn carbon dioxide and water into life-sustaining sugars, coincidentally ensuring the oxygen we breath, the food we eat and the natural fibers that still clothe many of us.

Given that plants provide our very sustenance - that we depend on them to fill our lungs and our stomachs doesn't it only make sense that this green lifeblood should capably fill our medicine chests too? After all this dependence is no accident; it is the result of millions of years of co-evolution, during which our genes and plant genes developed a shared chemical language, engaging in many of the same life-giving reactions.

By contrast, synthetic medicines have been around for only about 200 years. They are relative strangers (or strange relatives) to our genes and consequently produce more ill and sometimes fatal side effects than the more genetically familiar herbal alternative. Is there a place for conventional pharmaceuticals? Yes. If you suffer from a single ailment that has been correctly diagnosed, the physician's monocompound silver bullet will likely help you and may in fact be the best thing for you. But if your diagnosis is off or other comorbid factors are present, that silver bullet may well miss one or more of its marks.

Some years ago, I was privy to a conversation among a group of medical researchers who were weighing potential target sites for a new class of arthritis drugs. One argued rather obviously that the drugs should target susceptible receptor sites. "Which one?" countered another, pointing with frustration to the sheer number of potential targets. Someone else used the word "chaos" to describe the hundreds of organic chemicals that can influence the hundreds of physiological reactions that play a role in the many kinds of arthritis. These M.D.'s were in search of a pharmaceutical smart missile that would impact just one or a very few of these reactions. Trouble is, its hard to aim that precisely, and even if you hit the target, there's no telling what effect the reverberations of that shot will have on neighboring reactions.

One of the scientists posed what I found a particularly apt analogy: A drug gunning for a disease target is, he suggested, like pelican diving for fish. (A school of fish is, in turn, like a well-coordinated group of homeostatic equations, functioning as a unit, yet strengthened by the numbers.) The pelican may come up with one, perhaps a couple, fish, but no one bird will ever get the whole school. The Green Farmacy' s synergetic shotgun behaves more like a flock of coordinated pelicans, work ing in concert to conquer the school. I'd bet that m any arthritics would benefit, for instance, by trading in some of their steroids and analgesics for turmeric, a spice rich in curcumin, a natural cyclo-oxygenase (COX-2) inhibitor that seems to be safer than the celebrated new COX-2 inhibiting pharmaceuticals, Celebrex and Vioxx. (COX-2 is an enzyme produced in injured tissue that causes pain and swelling. Drugs designed to inhibit this enzyme burst onto the market in late 1998, beginning with Celebrex. Already this new "miracle as pirin" has had to be relabeled once to warn against unforeseen complications in patients also taking blood thinners such as Warfarin. But that hasn't slowed physicians' pens: By last May, just five months after its approval, 4 million prescriptions of Celebrex had been dispensed nationwide.)

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