If humans had designed the medicinal arrangements in plants, I’d have guessed that committees were involved. The mixes, and the proportions, often appear whimsical or arbitrary. For instance, tobacco has Snow White and the Seven Dwarves – nicotine and a handful of minor players, some with anagram names such as cotinine. Cannabis has the 101 …
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Stabilizing Cannabidiol
Cannabidiol is everywhere. I’ve even seen gas stations with big signs outside advertising their CBD products. But there’s an elephant in the check-out line: almost nobody lists the amount of CBD on their labels. There are reasons for that. First, the purified material is still shockingly costly. Thus, many sellers add the minimum to qualify …
Bacteria as Drug Factories
If organic chemistry had an Olympic event, it would involve finding the easiest way to synthesize natural drugs. Some routes have 30 or 40 steps, and the yields are horrendous because of side reactions all along the way. Various chemists have become organic rock stars by streamlining a synthesis to only a dozen or so …
Medicine in Transition: Fecal Transplants
My parents grew up on rural farms. One day as a kid I was having a grand old time on a hulking fertilizer cart in a granddad’s barnyard. Mom came out of the house and was – to say the least – distressed. It turned out the cart’s technical name was “manure spreader”. Mom had …
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Micronutrients in the Staples
The World Health Organization uses the term “hidden hunger” to describe a condition that affects a third of the world’s population. Victims of hidden hunger aren’t necessarily starving (though they may be) but they’re undernourished from a dietary deficiency. And that poses health risks. A recent international study addressed this by spraying a cocktail of …
Ivy’s on My Mind
The three-leaf triads of poison ivy are common in North America except in cities and deserts. Most people I know have had the rash. Native remedies treated it topically with a plant that grew nearby: jewelweed. Modern workers have guessed that jewelweed’s secret was lawsone, a red dye that binds to proteins and is also …
One-Bout Wonders
Some decades back I had hay fever of epic proportions one weekend. I’d never heard of Chlor-trimeton® but the label sounded good, and the drug worked wonders immediately. That was my one and only real success with it. It didn’t do much later for allergy flare-ups. Fast-forward twenty years, and someone recommended Echinaceae when I …
Hawking the Good Stuff
My folks relocated a few weeks before I entered high school. The house we moved into was an inglorious shade of brown mustard that Mom described as pumpkin-colored. She tolerated it until the day when Dad – with farm-bred slyness – called it “cat-manure yellow”. After that she’d settle for nothing but gleaming white, so …
Children & Cancer
A recent study of 200 nations (i.e., the world) estimates that although 400,000 children contract cancer every year, almost 50% are never diagnosed or treated. This is based on a statistical model because registry data is spotty. Only 3% of pediatric cases go undiagnosed in Europe and America, thus the numbers elsewhere are often much …
On Rats & Multiplication
Here in the South we get our share of troubling wildlife: fire ants, black widows, brown recluses, the occasional scorpion, and all four types of North American poisonous snakes. Then there are the gators, black bears, and other predators in the hinterlands. Of course, the assortment out west is sobering, too: grizzlies and brown bears …
Circling-V ™ 