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.
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.
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.Cancer Number of Articles Breast Cancer 91 Colorectal Cancer 34 Colon Cancer 61 Prostate Cancer 61 Pancreatic Cancer 35 Cancers: Drug Resistant 50 Lung Cancer 63 Liver Cancer 46 Cancer Metastasis 36 Skin Cancer 19
Source: www.greenmedinfo.com/substance/curcuminAs 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.
References
[1] https://cen.acs.org/articles/92/web/2014/11/Tufts-Study-Finds-Big-Rise.html [2] Curcumin’s LD50 (lethal dose, 50%) in mice is at least 2,000 mg/kg, versus 5-fluorouracil 115 mg/kg, or