Reprinted with author permission. Enjoy! B'adant
Garlic-induced fulminant hepatitis By Warren Bell, MD
Lost in all this heated discussion of OTC statin use is
the whole issue of the appropriate role of drugs as a
treatment for what is manifestly a disease of lifestyle in
95% of cases.
It is interesting to see that the FDA has, without comment,
shifted its ground (unless, of course, it was already there
beforehand) to a discussion of drug therapy in an utter
therapeutic vacuum -- just what the industry wants it to do!
No mention of the relative value of exercise, diet, stress,
non-drug biological supplements or dietary augmentation
(e.g. garlic), or environmental influences (one scientist
proposed that heart attacks in Los Angeles on "bad air days"
be called 'lung attacks' instead).
In the feeding frenzy around OTC vs Rx availability, we are
losing our sense of proportion, and along with it, our
humanity. Here's a little more evidence along these lines.
The latest issue of Nutrition Action, the newsletter of the
Centre for Science in the Public Interest, discusses the
safety of supplements. CSPI is a fine organization, founded
out of Ralph Nader's many anti-corporate activities, and
usually quite enlightened and hard-hitting in its
perpective. Yet the CSPI, in this issue, recommends that
children and pregnant women avoid taking garlic and soy
isoflavones supplements "until more research is done". The
article does acknowledge that "most reactions are rare: in
some cases they are based on just one or two reports from
physicians". But even allowing for the modest difference in
supplementary formulation vs food sources, is this not
amazing overkill?
There are dozens of reports of statins causing severe and
even fatal reactions. One member of this class, Bayer's
Baycol, is off the market because it was the worst of the
lot, but the others all do this to some degree -- it's
inherent in their mode of action. They all deplete stores of
co-enzyme Q10, which is a critical metabolic element in a
wide variety of physiological processes.
How many people have turned up in a critical care setting
with "garlic-induced fulminant hepatitis", or "soy isoflavone-
related dementia"?! How many people end up in the ER with
exercise-induced renal failure? (I'm talking about exercise
when "used as directed by recognized experts"😉. How many
folks haunt the ICU with "square-dancing-related pulmonary
fibrosis"? How about "music-induced hyperkalemia"?
We're going nutty, driven by a corporate agenda that wants
us to see "a pill for every ill" as the only way to fly.
OTC, Rx, coin-operated machines, free give-aways -- industry
doesn't care, as long as our first thought, when we feel
unwell, is to take a drug.
I believe there is a universal rule of biochemistry
underlying all this. Molecules (and the behaviours that
produce them) that have been around for a few million years,
and tested empirically by billions of people without
discernible adverse effects beyond highly predictable or
nuisance ones (garlic breath, exercise-induced fatigue, music-
related procrastination, love-induced foolishness) are
likely to safe.
Molecules invented a few months, years, or decades ago by a
person who's primary goal is to find a patentable substance
that is safe enough to make it through a mickey-mouse
testing process onto the market where it is likely to
produce billions of dollars of profit --such molecules are
unlikely to be safe, and are potential causes of "stealth"
reactions that are unpredictable and dangerous. I know
there's always exceptions, but I believe the general rule
still holds.
And we haven't even mentioned the fact of the industrial
world siphoning most of the world's resources in order the
create the conditions of super-excess of everything that
allow "diseases of affluence" to happen in the first place,
and also provide the materials for a huge chemical industry
to develop around it. And then using force of arms or threat
thereof to maintain this obscene imbalance.