"Neutriceuticals - 3"
"Neutriceuticals
- 3"
November 6, 2002
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Curcumin
Turmeric--the mouth-warming ingredient of curry sauce--is
being tipped as a treatment for Alzheimer's Disease and for radiation burns: Curry
'may treat radiation burns'
- BBC,
Curry 'may slow
Alzheimer's' -
BBC. Curcumin is the
active chemical in turmeric. Feeding Alzheimer's patients turmeric reduced the
numbers of amyloid plaque in their brains by 50%. Feeding turmeric to aged rats
also permitted them to outperform Turmeric also aids digestion, fights
infection, and guards against heart attacks. "It
is now being investigated for the treatment of colon cancer and Alzheimer's
disease as well as burns. Dr Richard Harvey, director of research at the
Alzheimer's Society, said: "Curcumin has both anti-oxidant and
anti-inflammatory properties. 'Drugs with similar properties could potentially
be used as preventative treatments for Alzheimer's disease.' However,
Dr Harvey warned that it could be many years before such drugs were made widely
available".
Problems with reward systems
This underscores a major problem with Western medicine:
the fact that pharmaceutical companies can't make money with unpatentable,
natural remedies. And this brings us to a broader, deeper subject: that of
reward systems in general. It seems to me that little or no attention is paid to
designing and testing reward systems to produce desired results. For example, we
pay our national legislators, our Supreme Court Justices, and our chief
executives fewer dollars than we pay a sizable number of our 300,000+ M. D.'s
and our 300,000+ dentists. Evidently, we think that our 300,000+ M. D.'s and our
300,000+ dentists are more important to our country's future than our 600 top
governors. As a result, our governors have found ways to pay themselves more
equitably at terrible cost to the voters whom they nominally serve. When the
United States was young, the amounts of money that our Washington
representatives handled was commensurate with the size of our fledging country.
Today, the United States is one of, if not the wealthiest country on earth,
while average per capita wealth has soared beyond the wildest dreams of the 18th
century. We desperately need a reward system that reimburses our highest
government officials in accordance with our affluence, while at the same time,
curbing clandestine remuneration through PACs.
You don't suppose that the United States government is for
sale to the highest bidder, do you?
Telomerase
Telomerase research seems
to have shifted to its potential application to cancer treatments. Since, unlike
somatic cells, cancer cells achieve immortality by expressing telomerase,
telomerase blockers will cause cancer cells to age, and eventually, to die.
Accordingly, a lot of money is being invested in research into telomerase
blockers. Dr. Perricone's timetable for telomerase availability, published in
2000, may have been predicated upon the idea that telomerase would be brought to
market as soon as possible. But I haven't been able to find any discussions of
the administration of telomerase to mice or to fruitflies to see what it does
for their lifespans or their cancer incidences.
For some reason, the fact that cancer cells express
telomerase led some early researchers to suggest that perhaps telomerase would
cause cancer if introduced into differentiated cells. Why that might be I'm not
sure. Since cancer cells produce telomerase in profusion, it would seem to me as
though cancer cells would be unaffected by telomerase, since they're already
steeped in it. However, biological interactions are wickedly complex. I don't
yet know enough to be dangerous. Human skin which has had its telomerase gene
activated shows no signs of aging, nor has it developed cancer [The
Wrinkle Cure- Unlock the Power of Cosmeceuticals for Supple, Youthful Skin,
Nicholas Perricone, M. D., Assistant Professor of Dermatology, Yale University
Medical School, Warner Books, 2000, pg. 186.]
