Why The Law Forbids The Medicinal Use of Natural Substances
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In Brief
- The Facts:This article
was written by Sayer Ji, founder of Greenmedinfo.com where this article
first appeared. Posted here with permission.
- Reflect On:Why is nature legal? Why do we always get the medication that can be patented? Why are these medications the only ones doctors are allowed to recommend?
According to the FDA’s legal definition, a drug is anything that “diagnoses, cures, mitigates, treats, or prevents a disease.”
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The problem with this definition is that there are numerous substances, as readily available and benign as found on our spice racks, which have been proven by countless millennia of human experience to mitigate, prevent and in some cases cure disease, and which cannot be called drugs according to the FDA.
How can this be? Well, the FDA has
assumed for itself Godlike power, requiring that its official approval
be obtained before any substance can legally be used in the prevention
and treatment of disease.
The FDA’s legal-regulatory control
therefore is totalitarian and Napoleonic in construct; what it does not
explicitly permit as a medicine is implicitly forbidden.
Historically the FDA has required new
drugs undergo expensive and elaborate multi-phased clinical trials,
which are out of the grasp of any ordinary interest who might want to
demonstrate the efficacy of a non-patentable (and therefore
unprofitable) herb, food or spice.
The average out-of-pocket cost for
obtaining a new drug approval is 2.6 billion dollars,[1] and therefore
an investor putting capital into bringing to market a substance that
does not lend itself to market exclusivity and therefore cannot produce a
return on investment, is committing economic suicide, if not also
breaking the law. The investor actually has a legally-binding fiduciary
responsibility to its shareholders to make a profit. And therefore,
capital will not flow into any would-be commodity that can be produced
or obtained with ease, including most things that grow freely on this
Earth.
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It is an interesting footnote in history
that shortly after the Declaration of Independence, Congress declared
that natural substances, e.g. water or salt, were God’s gift to mankind
and that therefore products of nature should be limited in their patent
protection. While this was a noble declaration, it has actually been
used against those whose rights it would protect. It has forced
private interests to synthetically alter natural substances — for
instance the burgeoning biotech field of recombinant DNA technology,
i.e. genetically modified organisms (GMOs) — for the sole reason that it
guarantees them ownership/patent rights.
In fact, a medical system that, due to its corporate structure, legally requires it make a profit threatens
to destroy and/or incriminate itself if non-patented, non-profitable
natural substances or therapies are employed. It also results in so much
collateral damage to those it purports to serve that it could rightly
be called a modern form ofhuman sacrifice.
As a result, instead of choosing
prospective medicines logically: because they work, are easily
accessible, and safe, billions of dollars flow in the exact opposite
direction, capitalizing only those substances which are unnatural, and
therefore while proprietary are almost invariably unsafe and less
effective, and whose access and administration can be intensively
controlled.
Has The Attempt To Co-opt Medicine Through the Drug-Based Model Undone Itself?
And yet, there is a silver lining to the story. Due to the fact that our bodies are ultimately constructed from the natural things (food,
air and water), and obey very strict natural laws such as the
well-known principle of chirality (handedness) – the fact that all amino
acids in our body turn a beam of polarized light in the left-handed
direction (L-lysine) and sugars to the right-handed direction (D-ribose)–
one cannot simply create biologically active, synthetic drugs
arbitrarily, as a mistake in handedness (or similar property) could be
fatal (this is the lethal problem with ibuprofen).
Nature, therefore, still provides an elegant biomolecular architecture
of irreproducible intelligence and complexity, from which synthetic
analogs are modeled and/or derivatives are spun.
As a result, billions of dollars of drug
industry and government money (i.e. tax payer money) flow into finding
lead compounds for drug development. Nature is put on the rack, if you
will, and her secrets teased from her through innumerable animal and
test tube experiments, in order to find compounds that can then be
converted into synthetic, patented drugs.
Inadvertently, some of the very same
companies and interests which require that natural substances not
receive the same drug-approval status as synthetic ones, are funding
research that prove basic vitamins, foods and spices are as effective or more effective – and usually much safer – than the drugs they are developing to replace or supplant them.
This means that tens of thousands of studies do
exist showing that natural substances may prevent and/or treat disease,
at least in the in vitro (test tube) and animal models. These results
often confirm traditional uses in Ayurvedic,
Chinese and other traditional systems of medicine, and therefore may be
compelling enough for individuals or healthcare practitioners to use
the information to inform their treatment decisions.
The Case For Curcumin In the Prevention and Treatment of Disease
The government biomedical and life
sciences database known as Medline contains over 28 million published
study citations, and is accessible to search through engines such as Pubmed.gov.
3.6 million of them contain reference to cancer. 250,000 of them
remain after applying the “Complementary Medicine” filter. There are
1,042 topics related to cancer which can be found indexed on the GreenMedInfo.com database, referencing 838 natural substances of potential value.
Turmeric, and particularly its polyphenolic constituent known as curcumin, which gives the spice its golden hue, is one of the most extensively studied natural compounds of all time, with11,700 references to
it on the National Library of Medicine’s bibliographic database known
as Medline [as of 6.01.2018]. And yet, despite having been shown to have
therapeutic value in over 800 disease states in animal and in vitro
studies, it still has not been the subject of extensive human clinical
research – for the reasons stated above.
GreenMedInfo.com, an open source natural
medicine database, has indexed curcumin’s anti-cancer properties in
over 50 cancers, with the top 10 most cancers researched in association
with curcumin listed below.
As one can see curcumin holds great
promise. It has been repeatedly demonstrated to possess simultaneously
both chemoprotective/chemosensitizing and
radioprotective/radiosensitizing properties, meaning it is capable of
reducing the adverse effects on healthy cells caused by chemotherapy and
radiotherapy, as well as enhance the cancer-killing properties of these
conventional therapies. It also has an exceptionally high margin of
safety, at least an order of magnitude greater than commonly used
conventional chemotherapy agents such as 5-fluoruracil.[2] Given these
facts curcumin, at the very least, should be considered an ideal
candidate for use as an adjuvant in integrative cancer care, and perhaps
as a first-line treatment alternative to conventional chemo-agents.
To learn more about our Turmeric/Curcumin Research, watch my latest update:
References
[2] Curcumin’s LD50 (lethal dose, 50%) in mice is at least 2,000 mg/kg, versus 5-fluorouracil 115 mg/kg, or
Sayer Ji is founder of Greenmedinfo.com, a reviewer at the International Journal of Human Nutrition and Functional Medicine, Co-founder and CEO of Systome Biomed, Vice Chairman of the Board of the National Health Federation, Steering Committee Member of the Global Non-GMO Foundation.
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