The Extraordinary Healing Power of Ordinary Things by Larry Dossey M.D

Author:Larry Dossey, M.D. [Larry Dossey, M.D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

A Little Respect?

I come from generations of farmers. Perhaps that’s one reason I naturally respect the contributions plants make to human welfare, and why I recoil when I see medicinal plants treated disrespectfully by professionals, who you’d think would know better.

Consider the anticancer drug Taxol, which the National Cancer Institute recently touted as the biggest therapeutic breakthrough in cancer treatment of the past two decades.31 Taxol was originally derived from the bark of the Pacific yew tree, Taxus brevifolia, as mentioned earlier. When the compound was initially discovered, six one-hundred-year-old yews had to be sacrificed to recover enough drug to treat a single patient. At this rate the tree would have become rapidly extinct in the Pacific Northwest. Because of the outcry of environmental groups, the pharmaceutical industry found ways of growing their own yews rather than cutting down wild ones, and of extracting the active ingredient from the yew’s needles. The results have been spectacularly rewarding for drug giant Bristol-Myers Squibb. In 1996 alone, global sales of Taxol exceeded $800 million, lending additional meaning to “green” medicine.32

Here’s how the drug company describes Taxol in the venerable

Physicians’ Desk Reference (PDR):33

Paclitaxel [Taxol’s generic name] is a natural product with antitumor activity. The chemical name for paclitaxel is 5(3,

20-Epoxy-1,2a, 4,73, 10(3, I3a-hexahydroxytax-II-en-9-one 4,10-diacetate 2-benzoate 13-ester with (2R, 3S)-N-benzoyl-3-phenylisoerine. . . . Paclitaxel is a white to off-white powder with the empirical formula C4?H5INOI4 and a molecular weight of 853.9. It is high lipophilic, insoluble in water, and melts at around 216-217° C.

This is like describing Mona Lisa in terms of the chemical composition of the pigments Leonardo used. Aside from referring to Taxol as a “natural product,” no mention is made of the Pacific yew tree in the company’s entire four-page description, in spite of the fact that without the tree the drug would not exist. After yielding its precious medicine, the yew has been cast aside. It does not merit even a footnote of gratitude, an honorable mention, a sideways glance. You’d think that a company that reaps around $1 billion a year from a plant might pay it a bit more respect in print. No wonder Taxol causes wretched side effects—more than two pages of “Warnings” and “Adverse Reactions”—as if this is its way of protesting the insult.

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