The scientific and medical literature of the 1800s gives us thousands of case studies primarily from Europe, Canada and the US, as well as somewhat limited published research, on the role of Coca Leaf preparations in treating and healing an impressive range of conditions and diseases.
In these case studies Coca Leaf was almost always consumed by the patient as tea (hot water extract) or tonic (alcohol extract), which means that the initial site of almost all the recorded medical action of Coca Leaf on the body was the human gut.
The same has been true for hundreds of generations in the Andes – they chew Coca first to bathe their gut with the healing, balancing juices, and from there the healing influences radiate throughout their muscular, endocrine and nervous systems.
So according to the historical evidence, the healing action of Coca Leaf appears to be centered in the gut.
Fast forward to today.
We now know that it is the health and balance of an individual’s gut microbiome that determines their overall state of health. We know that when that balance is upset gut diseases occur, and we increasingly understand how metabolic and neurological diseases are linked to disturbances of the gut microbiome.
Human adults carry about six pounds of bacteria in our gut, and in this mass of living organisms there are literally tens of thousands of species – most of them still unidentified. However we do know the major players in the human gut, and increasingly we are finding out that changes in the populations of these major players, plus blooms of pathogenic players like klebsiella and c. dificil, seem increasingly likely to be causing serious human illness.
So it may not be making too much of a speculative leap to say that it is likely that one of the important things that 19th Century science is telling us is that Coca Leaf helps to maintain, and works to restore a healthy gut microbiome, although of course those 19th Century doctors knew nothing of the gut microbiome. But they did know that Coca Leaf preparations worked on a wide range of diseases – better than almost anything else in their apothecary.
It certainly wouldn’t take a major research project to confirm or to disprove what I believe the 19th Century medical literature so clearly suggests. As part of the work I’m doing in trying to find funding for “Centros de Coca Curación” I intend to include funding for research studies in this and related areas, engaging reputable degreed scientific and medical researchers in Peru, Bolivia and any other country where they would be free to conduct their work and publish the results.
Readers of this blog know that in past posts I have engaged in a lot of speculation on the modern implications what 19th Century science knew about the healing properties of pure, natural Coca Leaf. I believe that the richness of the human experience recorded in those days by people of science and medicine can guide us today, lost as we are in the machinations of the pharmaceutical and allopathic medical “industries”.
Isn’t it time to begin demanding that legislators in states that have legalized Medical Cannabis now move to legalize first the import of fresh Coca Leaf and Coca Medicines and also to legalize cultivation of Coca Leaf in the United States for general consumption as well as medical purposes?
E. coli is in the news a lot for its role in causing “food poisoning”, which kills and sickens huge numbers of people every year. In this post I will briefly review the most comprehensive study (2008) to date on the use of a remarkable probiotic with the potential to both treat and prevent E. coli infections. If you choose to follow the link at the end of the post to read the whole study, you’ll also find links to hundreds of related studies, many of them more current.
(Some readers may wonder why I post so much on the subject of gut bacteria when this blog is nominally about the Coca plant and its medical potential. The two subjects are closely related, and although it may be years before we see open access to pure, natural Coca Leaf and its healing potential, research into the role of gut bacteria in mediating the balance between whole body health and disease is exploding. I have received strong messages of encouragement from readers of this blog to continue to point out information resources that may be relevant and helpful for those who are struggling with gut disease.)
According to the website http://www.about-ecoli.com/ : “The E. coli that are responsible for the numerous reports of contaminated foods and beverages are those that produce Shiga toxin, so called because the toxin is virtually identical to that produced by Shigella dysenteria type 1. The best-known and also most notorious E. coli bacteria that produce Shiga toxin is E. coli O157:H7. Shiga toxin–producing E. coli (STEC) cause approximately 100,000 illnesses, 3,000 hospitalizations, and 90 deaths annually in the United States. Most reported STEC infections in the United States are caused by E. coli O157:H7, with an estimated 73,000 cases occurring each year. A study published in 2005 estimated the annual cost of E. coli O157:H7 illnesses to be $405 million (in 2003 dollars), which included $370 million for premature deaths, $30 million for medical care, and $5 million for lost productivity.”
Perhaps it is needless to point this out, but this data is only on the US – the toll taken by E. coli worldwide is in the millions of people, disproportionately the very young and very old.
Because antibiotics are not effective against E. coli there is no treatment for this potentially deadly infection – doctors are limited to hydrating and nourishing the patient while their immune system attempts to overcome this tenacious invader. Meanwhile, E. coli is busy attacking the victim’s gut using multiple strategies. The bug’s primary weapon is its ability to attach itself to the lining of the gut and produce lesions. These lesions break down the tightly-bound specialized cells of the gut lining, which are designed to keep large molecular structures from passing through the gut wall, producing a condition known as “leaky gut”, which can trigger a range of dangerous immune system reactions. An E. coli infection also produces acute diarrhea, hemorrhagic colitis, and hemolytic-uremic syndrome among other potentially life-threatening outcomes.
The study that is the subject of this post, published in the journal “Infection and Immunity”, is entitled “Lactobacillus rhamnosus Strain GG Prevents Enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli O157:H7-Induced Changes in Epithelial Barrier Function”.
While this is a lengthy and complex paper, here is how the authors “bottom line” their findings:
“Taken together, the results of this study indicate that L. rhamnosus GG has the ability to protect against E. coli O157:H7-induced damage of the epithelial monolayer barrier function by preventing changes in host cell morphology, A/E lesion formation, monolayer resistance, and macromolecular permeability. In addition, L. rhamnosus GG pretreatment prevents E. coli O157:H7-induced morphological redistribution of intercellular tight junction proteins and a decrease in the expression of ZO-1.”
“We expanded findings of previous investigators by demonstrating that L. rhamnosus GG pretreatment interrupts the infectious processes of E. coli O157:H7, without bactericidal activity. By demonstrating the mode of action of this probiotic strain in attenuating E. coli O157:H7 infection, we expanded our knowledge regarding the unique protective contributions of this specific probiotic bacterium when it is cultured with epithelial cells. It is increasingly recognized that the effects of probiotics are both species and strain specific. Accordingly, it is important to better define how individual probiotics elicit their beneficial effects as biotherapeutic agents against pathogen-induced disorders of the gastrointestinal tract”
Perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind when reviewing this research is that it was performed “in vitro” – literally in petri dishes, and not “in vivo”- in living organisms such as mice or humans. So we can’t take the findings of this research and conclude that the probiotic Lactobacillus rhamnosus Strain GG will definitely prevent E. coli infections in the human gut and/or prevent or limit damage from E. coli infections in humans once they have occurred.
However, while we can’t draw those conclusions based on this research, after reading this research carefully we can legitimately conclude that there seems to be a very high likelihood that Lactobacillus rhamnosus Strain GG will do just that.
When you follow this link you will land on the full article in the journal “Infection and Immunity”. The article is long and detailed and requires a certain amount of scientific and medical vocabulary to gain a full understanding of what the cited research does, and does not show. However, as long as you are not intimidated by technical language, if you follow the link you’ll find an even greater treasure trove of informatio on this article’s National Institutes of Health webpage.
Just to the right of the Title & Authors you’ll see a feature entitled “Similar Articles in PubMed”. As you look down the short list of articles you’ll see a link that says “See All”. If you click that link you’ll get to a page that shows you the first 20 of 198 similar articles. They are displayed 20 to a page by default, but you can change that by looking at the very top of the page and clicking the down arrow next to “20 per page”. That down arrow will then give you a drop-down menu that will let you choose to display up to 200 citations at one time. If you choose this option you will have all 198 citations on a single page, making it much easier to save the whole list for your leisurely inspection.
Long-time readers of Panaceachronicles know that the human gut is one of my passions and that I have been an advocate for the use of probiotics as both preventative and healing medicines. A good understanding of the role of probiotics in controlling, treating and even curing inflammatory gut disease is even more important now that in many states patients have access to medical marijuana for relief of symptoms. Combining the symptomatic relief of Cannabis with the right probiotics to help heal the gut and prevent further colonization by pathogens is without doubt the natural path to effective treatment.
It is well-known that there are significant differences in the effectiveness of different brands of commercial probiotics. A quick glance at the labels will confirm the great discrepancies between brands. Since there are important differences in the species of bacteria they provide, the concentrations of each species, the viability of those bacteria, the methods used to culture the bacteria, the sources of the extraction base, and the matrix in which the bacteria are stabilized for human consumption, being an informed probiotics buyer is a critical part of healing yourself.
Probiotics appear to be one of those classes of products where you really do get what you pay for – although a high price is not a guarantee of a more effective medicine. Just because a particular brand is very expensive, or contains an impressive list of species, doesn’t mean that it is the right choice for you. You have to do your homework on your own gut biome, and it is important that the probiotics you choose are tailored to the gaps or weaknesses in your own gut microbes.
If you are serious about getting a hand on an inflammatory gut issue and haven’t yet had your gut biome profiled, you may want to consider participating in the crowd-sourced “American Gut Project”. This project is not limited to people in the US, by the way.
However, this blog post is to alert readers to something new and very important that is emerging in the field of probiotics, specifically that there is now a highly concentrated form of probiotic called “Amanlac probiotics”, that appears to be far more effective against a wide range of inflammatory gut diseases than even the best “commercial” probiotics.
In an article in the June 2012 Journal of Food & Drug Analysis entitled “High Concentrated Probiotics Improve Inflammatory Bowel Diseases Better Than Commercial Concentrations”. The article details Korean research into Amanlac probiotics – it seems that Korean and Japanese microbiologists are far ahead of the west in understanding how specific probiotic configurations can be used to treat specific inflammatory gut diseases. Here is how the researcher’s describe their findings in the article abstract:
“Probiotics have been clinically administered to improve intestinal inflammation in Inflammatory Bowel Disease. In this study we identified that higher concentrations of probiotics called “Amanlac” probiotics protected intestinal tissues with the regulation of cytokine production and the improvement of intestinal injury in mice with dextran sodium sulfate (DSS)-induced Colitis much better than commercial probiotics. Amanlac probiotics significantly ameliorated both gross and pathological scores caused by DSS in a concentration-dependent manner, based on the following mechanisms: inflammatory markers such as IL1-β, TNF α, and COX-2 as well as MMPs and ICAM1 were significantly lower in probiotic-treated mice following DSS treatment compared with DSS-treated control mice, but the overall efficacy of “Amanlac” probiotics was significantly improved over conventional concentration of probiotics. In conclusion, administration of higher concentration probiotics helps to successfully maintain intestinal homeostasis while also improving intestinal inflammation.”
While there may be other “Amanlac” probiotics available, the brand that my wife and I have found to be remarkable in its ability to restore normal, healthy, pain-free intestinal functioning is Dr. Ohhira’s Professional Formula. These probiotics are manufactured in Japan using both traditional and state-of-the-art fermentation methods and incorporate a very wide range of traditional Japanese plants in the base mixture from which the probiotics are fermented and extracted.
If you are using a commercial probiotic and are having limited success you may want to read this research paper in its entirety and consider choosing an “Amanlac” probiotic rather than the one you are currently using.
While the advent of legal Medical Cannabis in many states has made the task of successful self-diagnosis and treatment far less difficult for many people suffering from a wide range of conditions and diseases, and has also made collaborative diagnosis and treatment far easier for people who are fortunate enough to find a thoughtful and insightful physician to work with, there are still many states where people don’t have the Medical Cannabis option, and even in those states where that option is available there are still many people with conditions and diseases for which Medical Cannabis is not the answer, or is not the whole answer. In every state, with or without legal Medical Cannabis, people are still faced with the challenge of finding a doctor who they can work with, and then figuring out how to accomplish that often difficult task.
Doctors wear white coats for the same reason that judges wear black robes, cops wear Darth Vader gear, the Pope wears funny hats, kings and queens wear crowns, corporate zombies wear suits, and soldiers display nasty weapons and paint their faces black – they all want you to see that they have authority, and you don’t. This means, among other things, that you are supposed to do what they say, and not ask questions – or else.
It is an extremely rare doctor who welcomes questions from their patients, unless those questions are asking for their advice – certainly questions that challenge their advice are not welcome. However in my experience that is exactly what you have to do every step of the way if you are going to actually be healed of whatever disease or ailment you are suffering from because if you don’t the odds of a successful outcome drop dramatically.
Doctors are busy people and for the most part stopped keeping up with research in their field the moment they left medical school, with the exception of what they gather attending seminars at medical conventions and from the pharmaceutical industry reps who bring them “the latest research” which incidentally involves giving their patients the latest drug their company is pushing. They certainly don’t have time to study research that is outside their field – a gastroenterologist generally has no idea what the latest research in endocrinology shows, and vice versa. If you go to a cardiologist to complain about pains in your chest, sure enough you’ll get that heart of yours tested, but the heart doc will probably never consider the possibility that diaphragm spasms caused by SIBO (small intestinal bacterial overgrowth) is pulling on your heart, or that you have a massive ulcer caused by helicobacter pylori infection in your stomach that is creating referred pain to your heart.
Likewise if you go to a gastroenterologist complaining of certain kinds of gut problems you’ll no doubt be tested for Celiac disease and Crohns, but there’s almost no chance that the gastro guy will order a panel of thyroid tests to see if you have Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis caused by an immune response to certain proteins in your diet which cause a parallel auto-immune attack on your thyroid. Wheat gluten protein and certain tissues in the thyroid have virtually identical molecular structures, so if you have the genetic predisposition to gluten intolerance, or if your gut microbiome is compromised by something like long-term exposure to RoundUp in your food, your immune system considers both gluten and your Thyroid to be the same foreign protein and attacks both.
Even if you have been tested for Gluten intolerance by the usual blood test, and your test shows no problems with gluten, that’s no guarantee that your immune system will agree with the test results. Equally unfortunately your thyroid can be under immune system attack and you can have perfectly normal TSH and T4 test results – Hashimoto’s only shows up when you are tested for thyroid antibodies (anti-TPO and TgAb), which most docs simply won’t do without a lot of arm-twisting, for some reason known only to them. The Thyroid antibody tests are certainly cheap enough (around $60 most places) even if you are self-pay, and they are definitive. If you have a lot of gut symptoms that don’t yield to conventional diagnosis this might be a possibility for you to explore. If you test positive for anti-TPO and TgAb you have Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis and while it can’t be cured it can be managed and the destruction of your Thyroid can be slowed or stopped.
The point is that while doctors are often very good at diagnosing and treating the 80% or so of patients whose problems in fact do lie within the boundaries of their specialty, almost none of them will ever consider stepping outside that specialized area of knowledge to look for linkages. Now, supposedly, that’s where the generalists like GPs and Internal Medicine docs come in – they are supposed to have an overview that gives them a more holistic perspective on you and your health issues. However these docs suffer from the same lack of time (and personal initiative) to stay on top of all relevant research in all fields so that they can in fact do their job of finding linkages between sets of symptoms that fall under different medical specialties and then send you to the appropriate practitioners in those specialties.
Most doctors would like for you to get better, and they would like to get credit for it, but even more they want to get paid whether they help you or not, and if they try everything they know how to do and you still don’t get better then a subtle shift takes place and they begin sending you semi-concealed but obvious “go away” messages. Doctors know that 80% or more of the people who walk through their doors can be easily diagnosed and treated to everyone’s satisfaction, and unless they are exceptionally dedicated physicians they are perfectly satisfied to be seen as heroes by 80% of their patients, and would rather that the remainder, who can’t be diagnosed or treated without a great deal of effort, would just disappear. That’s when you are told “there’s nothing more we can do for you”. Far too many doctors like to think of themselves as people with a magic kiss that can make the boo-boo go away, and when their magic doesn’t work, it somehow becomes your fault. That’s just human nature at work – but you wind up on the short end of that particular stick.
This is where you come in. Only you have a really pressing reason to spend the time and energy needed to thoroughly research your health issues – you want to get better! However, before you even start doing your own research there are a couple of things that you must do. The first is to find a GP or Internal Medicine doctor who is a good listener and who doesn’t think they know everything. Next you have to understand what kind of information this doctor (any doctor really) will give credibility to, and why. Finally you have to be able to research within the framework of that kind of information and, as you begin to discover what may be wrong with you, you have to know how to approach the doctor with that information. Finally, although you can certainly mine the internet chat rooms and health-related websites for information, you must follow the old CIA adage “Trust, but verify.”
Let’s take this one step at a time. If you don’t already know a doc who listens and doesn’t think they already know all there is to know, you are going to have to network with your friends and family until you find someone who knows such a doctor, and then you have to get into their practice. Fortunately there are plenty – well, quite a few anyway – of good docs out there. You just have to sort them out until you find the one who is right for you.
Then you have to get on the internet and find out everything you can about your symptoms. We all know that the internet is full of as much bad information as good, and it’s a matter of using your judgment. In general I would say that web sites that are pushing a product or a program for money are not good sources of information. Discussion groups and moderated forums tend to be much more productive. Finding people who are dealing with the same set of issues and symptoms as you are can be quite helpful. They can help you connect your symptoms with a set of possible diagnoses – but this isn’t information you want to print out and take to your doctor. This is just the first of two key steps – identifying what might be the cause or causes of your problems, with or without the help of other people.
The next and most critical step is to understand that doctors only accept one kind of medical/scientific information – the kind that comes from peer-reviewed articles in recognized medical journals. This is actually a good thing because it sets a high standard for the authenticity of the information. And here’s where things get really cool!
The National Institutes of Health, an agency of the US government, publishes an online database containing abstracts of over 23 million peer-reviewed articles (as of 2015) from recognized medical journals around the world – not just from the US. There are articles from peer-reviewed medical journals from dozens of countries with advanced medical research facilities. The database goes back as far as the 1960s and comes all the way forward to abstracts of articles that haven’t yet been published. Even better, the articles all cite the names of the researchers who did the work and are publishing it, and there are almost always direct email links to the researchers. I’ve found that many of these researchers will respond to requests for information – for example, links to other research they have published, or links to other relevant research by their peers. Just don’t overwhelm them with complicated requests, long narratives of what is wrong with you, or tearful pleas for help. Just let them know that you found the abstract of their work on PubMed useful and relevant to your health issues and that you would appreciate any additional information they care to share with you.
So once you’ve done your background research in forums and discussion groups online, you then move to the NIH database and begin using your symptoms, as well as any diagnosis that you think might apply, as key words to troll for medical journal articles where your symptoms are discussed. This can be time-consuming, and you have to be able to understand some pretty high-level scientific/medical language to make sense of what is bring written, but don’t let that discourage you, because these abstracts are almost always written with good clear language, if not exactly layman’s language, and with a little effort you’ll be able to penetrate the language.
It also helps (a lot) if you understand elementary statistics, because most of these abstracts discuss their findings using statistical language in the body of the abstract. But even if you don’t understand statistics very well, or at all, don’t despair, because there is always a short paragraph at the end of the abstract called ‘Results’ or ‘Conclusions’ or ‘Findings’ in which everything is summarized in reasonably plain language.
Once you log on you’ll see a simple search box at the top of the page where you can enter your search terms and go. On the home page you also see a lot of other specialized search options, but stick with the simple search box at the top at first. Once you get into the database you’ll see that the articles are generally arranged with the most recent on top. When you click on an article that looks relevant, you’ll get the abstract of that article but you’ll also get a box on the right hand side of the screen that suggests related articles you may want to investigate. As you proceed with your research, keep a Word document open on your desktop and just drag to select the abstract and its author data, then copy and paste this into your Word doc, which becomes your file of possibly relevant information.
My suggestion would be to spend a little more time once you’ve collected your abstracts and go through them putting the most relevant at the top of the document, saving your doctor the time and trouble of sorting through the information themselves. You are a lot more likely to get even a good, attentive doc’s attention if you hand them a single sheet with a couple of really juicy abstracts rather than a folder full of stuff for them to read. (And don’t forget, the contact email addresses for the researchers are almost always at the top of the abstract, so if you make sure that the links are “live” in the word document you give to your doctor, he or she can be in touch with the authors if they want more detailed information.) Once they have read what you give them, and you get their opinion on whether or not this might be relevant to what you’re dealing with, then is the time to hand them all the relevant info you’ve uncovered and say “Oh by the way, here are some more articles I thought were relevant – I just didn’t want to overwhelm you with all this before we had a chance to look at the ones I thought were most interesting.”
Let me end this foray into how to research your own health issues and find a doctor who is willing to consider information that lies outside their own field of knowledge with a short story on how I came to understand this process.
My wife was diagnosed several years back with a condition called ‘Barrett’s Esophagus’. There was a pre-cancerous lesion in her esophagus where it joins the stomach. It’s presence was confirmed by tissue pathology as well as a visual endoscopy. Barrett’s is almost always caused by reflux, which in my wife’s case was the result of SIBO (small intestine bacterial overgrowth) which in turn had been caused by being given an overdose of the wrong kind of a powerful antibiotic (Vancomycin) for an operation, which destroyed the ‘good bacteria’ in her upper GI tract allowing pathogenic bacteria to move upward from her colon where they are normally kept in check by the good bugs in the upper reaches of the gut. The good news, the gastroenterologist told us, is that the lesion was in its very early stages. The bad news, he told us, is that Barrett’s invariably progresses into full-blown esophageal cancer and at some point we were going to have to take extreme measures including surgery and radiation.
Aren’t there any treatments for Barrett’s in this early stage, we asked. No, he solemnly intoned, we have no research that gives us any treatment modalities. (They just love to use words like ‘modalities’.)
Now, I have since that time learned that when a doctor uses the word “We” he means the entire medical profession, and that is supposed to end the discussion right there, because if the entire profession doesn’t have a cure, then none exists – right? “We” is his cover story. So this doctor told us to go home and enjoy the life we had left together, and gave us maybe 5 years before things got really bad.
Neither my wife nor I take that kind of bullshit for an answer, but we had long ago grown tired of confronting pompous idiots in white coats, so we paid the guy’s bill and left.
Having been through this before the first thing we did was to log on to PubMed and start looking. At first we kept running into dead ends, but one thing about research is that you simply have to keep trying – shuffle your key words around, re-phrase, come up with new key words, etc. And here’s where PubMed really shines – it includes worldwide data – not just US studies. After you spend some time on PubMed you’ll see that there is a tremendous amount of research going on in Europe and Asia that the medical establishment in the US never hears about and, in many cases, actively rejects or ignores. This turned out to be the case with what ultimately led to a complete cure for my wife’s Barrett’s.
To keep this story short, we finally found a research paper presented in France by a US gastroenterologist, Dr. Stephen Stowe of North Carolina, whose research was not accepted (to say the least) by his peers in the US but which had attracted the attention of the European medical community. What we found was his address to a convention of internal medicine specialists from all over Europe in Marseilles, where his findings were hailed as a true breakthrough in the treatment and cure of Barrett’s. His treatment method was simple and non-invasive, and it used very inexpensive medications, and it worked – a huge percentage of his female Barrett’s patients had experienced complete remission within three years of beginning treatment, and most had been successful within one year. In retrospect it’s easy to see why his work was rejected by the US gastroenterology establishment – it was simple, inexpensive, and worked without any of their fancy technology and high-priced drugs. Can’t have that, now can we? That’s no way to pay for the wife’s Mercedes and a second home in Aspen, is it?
We tracked this doctor down (he had retired but a nurse in his former clinic put us in touch with him) and he agreed to call our doctor ( a naturopath, not the gastro guy) and discuss his treatment with her. They spent an hour on the phone and our doc came back to us and said that his research was impeccable and that we should begin immediately. We did, and it worked. A year later in a follow-up endoscopy (not the same gastro guy, needless to say) the lab results of tissue analysis showed NO TRACE of pathological changes. Her esophagus was healed. End of story. And five years later, another follow-up endoscopy has shown the same thing.
Here is an article that describe Dr. Stowe’s work in some detail. (After his acceptance in Europe the American College of Gastroenterology was forced to recognize him. However, note how they pooh-pooh his findings at the end of the article.)
A medical approach consisting of 3 agents (“triple therapy”) can reverse Barrett’s esophagus and the dysplasia that often follows, eliminating the risk for esophageal adenocarcinoma, according to investigators who presented their findings here at the 71st annual meeting of the American College of Gastroenterology (ACG). The treatment consists of a proton pump inhibitor to treat acid reflux, sucralfate suspension to treat bile and pepsin reflux, and folic acid as chemoprevention against dysplasia.
“Medical therapy with these 3 modalities reverses dysplasia and Barrett’s esophagus in clinical and endoscopic follow-up,” said principal investigator Stephen P. Stowe, MD. Dr. Stowe is medical director of the Lake Norman Center for Digestive and Liver Disease in Mooresville, North Carolina. “We saw no difference in dysplasia clearance in men and women or in those with and without a family history of Barrett’s esophagus. We saw no progression to cancer in 301 patient-years of follow-up.”
Dr. Stowe and his coinvestigator conducted the phase 2 study in 81 patients with Barrett’s esophagus who were selected from 3495 consecutive patients in a single practice who were scheduled to undergo esophageal endoscopy. Of these 81 patients, 44 were men and 37 were women. The investigators categorized patients by the presence of dysplasia and stratified their treatment accordingly. Those with no dysplasia received daily treatment with a proton pump inhibitor of choice, 1 mg daily of folic acid, and 10 cc of sucralfate at bedtime. Those with dysplasia were on doubled therapy: twice-daily doses of the proton pump inhibitor and folic acid, and 10 cc of sucralfate upon rising and at bedtime.
Follow-up regimens were also based on patients’ dysplasia status. Those with no dysplasia underwent conventional endoscopy and chromo-endoscopy beginning 12 months after the initiation of treatment. Those with mild dysplasia underwent these studies beginning 9 to 12 months after treatment started. Those with moderate to severe dysplasia underwent these studies beginning 3 to 6 months after initiating therapy. Patients were assigned a score based on endoscopy findings as well as clinical findings, such as symptoms of reflux and choking; the affected length of the esophagus, the presence of scarring; stenosis or ulcer; the severity of dyspepsia.
“Healing was evident starting at 9 months after treatment began, and most were healed by 48 months with some stragglers at 72 to 80 months,” said Dr. Stowe. “We documented full healing in 72% of very short and short segments, 75% of intermediate segments, and 17% of long segments.” Long segments were defined as more than 6 cm in length. Although healing of Barrett’s esophagus was slightly better in women and those with a family history of Barrett’s esophagus, there was no statistically significant difference by sex or family history for reversal of dysplasia, he said.
When they analyzed their data by the severity of dysplasia, the investigators found that 4 of 5 patients with moderate dysplasia had both reversal of dysplasia and healing of Barrett’s esophagus, as did 8 of 15 patients with mild dysplasia and 8 of 23 patients with indefinite dysplasia.
No patients in the overall group progressed to cancer after 301 patient-years of follow-up. Similarly, they documented no progression among the 48 patients with dysplasia and 177 patient-years of follow-up.
“To my knowledge this is the first study showing a reversal of Barrett’s with noninvasive methods. We find this intriguing and interesting,” said Phillip E. Jaffe, MD, in a phone interview. Dr. Jaffe, who was not involved in the study, is an associate professor of medicine at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, and he practices in Hamden, Connecticut. He spoke as a member of the ACG public relations committee.
“Do remember that is a single-center, retrospective study, and it needs to be replicated on a prospective manner, but it gives us hope that people with Barrett’s and dysplasia may benefit from a noninvasive intervention,” Dr. Jaffe added. “We don’t want people to adopt this as a primary mode of therapy until we have a lot more data, but we think it’s interesting.”
I wish that I could promise that every person’s medical dilemma can be cured as simply as my wife’s Barrett’s ultimately was, but of course I can’t. What I can promise is that if you don’t confront and challenge medical authority, and if you don’t understand how to do it effectively, then your chances of being cured go way, way down. Self-treating with alternative medicines and techniques are excellent choices for some people with some health issues, but they are unlikely to be the overall answer especially when you are dealing with many of the more serious health issues, so at some point you are probably going to have to take advantage of the best that conventional medicine also has to offer too. When you do, if you are well prepared with the facts in a form that a doctor who is willing to listen can deal with, your chances of successfully recovering your health are far increased. It really is that simple.
Reject bullshit, do your own research, live long, and prosper.
Past posts on this blog have discussed the healing potential of Coca Leaf for a wide range of diseases associated with inflammation, as well as the role that medical Cannabis is playing in helping people deal with the symptoms of, and in some cases successfully treating inflammatory disease. Healing and treating these devastating diseases is a good thing, but the real question is why are they occurring in the first place?
Many people have recognized that the incidence of inflammatory diseases has spiked over the past several decades and wondered what is causing this sudden explosion of suffering and death. Now it is possible to point to at least one of the major highly probable causes – the murderous pursuit of profit by a giant American company that is so powerful that it has gone unregulated by government and unaccountable to legal standards – so far.
Monsanto has claimed for years that their immensely profitable weed-killer Roundup™ works by targeting an enzyme found only in weeds and poses no threat to humans. However, research results are now coming in around the world that say otherwise, as my two previous posts have shown.
Not only is it now known that Roundup™ targets and destroys key enzymes found in the beneficial bacterial colonies that protect the human gut, but that once these bacteria are compromised or destroyed the way is open for gut diseases like Crohn’s, Ulcerative Colitis, IBS, Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis, and perhaps Pancreatic and Colon cancers.
Along with many others I have wondered why these inflammatory gut diseases, which were rare a generation or two ago, now seem to be epidemic in the populations of “advanced” societies – in other words, in societies where companies like Monsanto have come to dominate the processed food chain with their toxic chemicals and genetically engineered food plants like soy, wheat and corn.
A recent study is typical of many that have tried to find causal factors for the remarkable rise in Inflammatory Bowel Disease. The conclusion is right up front.
Current Trends In Inflammatory Bowel Disease: The Natural History
“During the last decades we have seen a steady increase in the incidence of IBD, especially CD (Crohn’s) and to a lesser extent in UC (Ulcerative Colitis), pointing to environmental factors as responsible for the rise in incidence, since genetically determined diseases have a stable occurrence.”
OK, so environmental factors are likely to be the cause of the rise in IBD because if IBD were genetic in origin the incidence of these diseases would be stable.
And not only are the causes environmental, but they must be increasing in incidence in order to explain the increase in incidence of IBD.
By now most people know that correlation is not causation, but take a look at just a few of the hundreds of graphs showing the rise in the use of Roundup™ on food crops over the past decades.
It is clear that Roundup™ is increasingly in every part of the human food chain.
When you overlay Roundup™ use on food with any IBD – in this case Celiac Disease – the results are the same.
The deadly impact of Roundup™ in the food chain is not limited to IBD – here’s a look at Diabetes.
When you combine the strong evidence that Roundup™ causes multiple Inflammatory Bowel Diseases (IBD) by destroying key microbes and their crucial metabolites with the irrefutable evidence that there is a powerful correlation between the increase in the use of Roundup™ in every part of the human food chain and the increase in the incidence of IBD worldwide, it would be hard not to conclude that Monsanto is responsible not only for mass murder but also for a hefty portion of increased health care costs. But these greedy scum saw that a day of reckoning was coming and in 1997 they executed a nifty little strategy to avoid accountability.
You can easily trace the thinking behind this whole scheme. According to Monsanto’s own website:
“ Prior to Sept. 1, 1997, a corporation that was then known as Monsanto Company (Former Monsanto) operated an agricultural products business (the Ag Business), a pharmaceuticals and nutrition business (the Pharmaceuticals Business) and a chemical products business (the Chemicals Business). Former Monsanto is today known as Pharmacia LLC. Pharmacia is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Pfizer Inc., which operates the Pharmaceuticals Business. Solutia is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Eastman Chemical Company, which operates the Chemicals Business. Today’s Monsanto includes the operations, assets and liabilities that were previously the Ag Business.”
In other words, prior to 1997 Monsanto was in the Ag business, the Chemicals business, and the Pharmaceuticals business. At some point in the mid-1990s Monsanto must have realized what their products were doing to people and to the environment and decided to protect themselves by fancy legal footwork that now allows them to say “Who – Us?” when they are accused of profiting at every point in a long causal chain of sickness and death. “We’re just a little old ag company – we don’t have anything to do with chemicals or pharmaceuticals.”
But given how the greedhead corporate mentality works, it isn’t surprising to find that Monsanto is back big time into the health care business with Monsanto Health Solutions, a company that “helps physicians manage their practice”. What a scheme. Get rich making people sick, and get richer by raking off profits from their treatment.
The corporate world is full of evil people with vile souls, but the executives, board of directors, legal staff and shareholders of Monsanto are at or near the top of the list of pure criminality. Please do what you can to support the current lawsuit in California that has a significant chance of bringing this evil empire to its knees. You can read about this courageous lawsuit here.
Readers of this blog have probably seen a number of my posts detailing 18th-19th Century medical research showing how effective Coca Leaf therapy was in dealing with inflammatory processes in the body. In addition, the medical research from previous centuries on which these posts were based makes it clear that one of the most common (and most effective) modalities for the use of medicinal Coca Leaf was in the treatment of dyspepsia – what we now call reflux, which is a sure sign of Gut Microbiome issues.
In an undeterminable, but undoubtedly very large proportion of cases of dyspepsia in those days the culprit was an exogenous bacteria called Helicobacter pylori, which is now known to be the cause of well over 90% of all stomach and intestinal ulcers. H. pylori is acquired in two ways – it can be acquired directly through ingestion of feces-contaminated water (not as uncommon as one might think, even in the US today), and it can be passed from person to person – often parent to child – through oral contact (Come on sweetie, eat your applesauce – look, Mommy is tasting it! Yum! Now you try some.). That is why H. pylori tends to run in families, and why it was so common in 18th – 19th Century Europe and America, when almost everyone was exposed pretty constantly to feces-contaminated water.
Now for the interesting bit.
While H. pylori infection is epidemic in most of the under-developed world, as shown by epidemiological studies, and is also pretty common in the US (virtually everyone who has diagnosed or undiagnosed ulcers is infected) it is almost unknown among the indigenous, Coca-chewing people of the Andes. HOWEVER, in the non-indigenous, non Coca-chewing cities of Peru and Bolivia H. pylori infection, and the consequent diseases, are as common as anywhere else in the developing world.
Wouldn’t it be interesting to compare the Gut Microbiomes of Coca-chewing indigenous Andean people with non-Coca Chewing city dwelling Peruvians and Bolivians, and also perhaps with the profiles of Americans who have participated in the American Gut Project?
So, to summarize.
1. Coca Leaf was well-known in the 18th – 19th Centuries as a treatment and positive cure for Dyspepsia, which means that it was able to control/eliminate gut infection by H. Pylori, and quite likely by other gut-dwelling pathogens.
2. H.pylori infection is virtually unknown among Coca-chewing Andean peoples, while it is common in the cities of Andean countries.
In science when a theory sounds plausible but the data to test it are absent, the rule is “Think about what the world would look like if the theory were true, and then look at the world.”
If we recall the well-established observations by doctors in the 18th-19th centuries that coca leaf-chewing indigenous Peruvian and Bolivian people showed (and still show) virtually no signs of oral cavity disease, have clearly healthy-functioning digestive systems, are highly resistant to diseases causes by external pathogens, and have highly efficient metabolic systems, it seems fair to speculate that Coca Leaf therapy might be able to arrest and reverse the damage to both the gut wall and the Gut Microbiome caused by antibiotics, industrial food chemicals, and other sources of the suffering and death that seems to be the fate of so many of us living in the “Advanced Economies” of the world.
There is little question in my mind that when Coca Leaf is finally given its day in scientific court it will be shown to be highly effective at treating inflammatory conditions in the gut, as well as conditions involving colonies of pathogens and degraded epithelial cells and the mucosal wall itself. It will be shown to be effective because it not only directly addresses inflammatory processes in the gut tissues, but also addresses the degenerative processes initiated by chemical damage, as with emulsifiers (see below), or by “bad bacteria” that have colonized the upper gut, or by oral cavity bacteria hiding in the plaque below the gums, or by exogenous bacteria like H. pylori that have colonized and set about destroying the integrity of the gut wall while they implant themselves in protective burrows in the mucosal layers.
After all, if the use of a simple, natural medicine like Coca Leaf could treat even one or two diseases like Crohn’s, Ulcerative Colitis, Hashimoto’s, IBS, SIBO, Celiac disease, Primary Biliary Cirrhosis, COPD, Asthma, Congestive Heart Failure, Atherosclerosis, Metabolic Disorder, Insulin Resistance, Obesity, Hyperglycemia, and possibly Alzheimer’s more effectively than the “medicines” currently offered by Pig Pharma – wouldn’t that be a marvelous gift from Mama Coca, the Mother Nature of the Andean people?
In the following discussion I hope to offer plausible if not convincing arguments that this possibility should be considered and seriously investigated.
Discussion
Those of us who for personal or professional reasons wonder about the origins of the diseases that seem to strike people in economically developed countries far more frequently than they do people who live in economically undeveloped parts of the world are increasingly seeing evidence that factors that affect gut bacteria play a major, poorly understood role in generating these advanced economy diseases, and offer a plausible explanation for why people in less advanced economies seem not to suffer from these diseases – at least until economic conditions improve for them.
Collectively these gut bacteria are known as the “Gut Microbiome”, and there are hundreds of thousands of species of these little communal creatures living in every part of the gut. While most of us think of the “Gut” as our stomach and intestines, in fact the gut runs from our mouth to our anus, colonized all the way by bacteria that specialize in living and performing specific functions in a specific part of our gut.
The Lane Lab at the University of Rhode Island is a treasure trove of research in this area. In a recent paper they write: “The human intestine is an ecosystem that supports up to 100 trillion microbes—a cell number that is roughly ten times greater than the human cells that comprise our bodies. In addition to the vast number of cells comprising the microbial community of the gut, there may be over 100 times the number of bacterial genes present compared with the number of genes in our own DNA (Bäckhed et al., 2005). These beneficial microbes are instrumental in our ability to extract nutrients from food, and also play an important role in the development of our immune systems.”
For example, our mouth contains @ 15% of the total number of species of bacteria in our gut, and although only dental hygienists ever mention it to us, having a healthy mouth is a critical part of whole body wellness. Leaving out, for the moment, the rest of the gut, a sick mouth biome can, by itself, trigger all kinds of disease conditions in organs as distant from the mouth as the brain and the heart.
(As an aside, if you have access to a dentist who uses the new laser technology for deep gum cleaning rather than the old “pick and scrape” technique – give it a try. I can tell you anecdotally that someone I know very well, who suffers from a severely compromised Gut Microbiome, and who has been doing all of the “Leaky Gut” therapies, found that after a single teeth cleaning with this laser technology her “Brain Fog” symptoms disappeared. She was not miraculously cured of all symptoms, but this one very annoying one simply went away.)
When all of these hundreds of thousands of little communities of bacteria are healthy and functioning as they should, our whole body tends to be healthy and vigorous. Not that there aren’t diseases that have nothing to do with a healthy gut that can ravage and destroy us – some of them caused by exogenous bacteria, some by exogenous viruses, some by environmental chemicals, some by radiation, etc. It’s a long list.
However, in this post I would like to ask you to indulge me as I speculate on the potential for simple, inexpensive Coca Leaf therapy as a possible preventative of some, or even many of the “Advanced Economy Diseases”, and also as a treatment and possible cure for others.
Because there are so many factors to consider when discussing the health of the Human Gut, let’s focus just on the role of bacteria in maintaining, or degrading, the mucosal lining of the gut – the “Wall” as it’s called. In the normal, healthy gut there are large numbers of bacterial species whose primary, or sometimes secondary role is to maintain the “Wall” as a thick, protective lining of the gut, allowing ingested substances – primarily food and drink, often called the “Luminal Mass” – to pass smoothly through the upper and mid-gut while nutrients are extracted from the passing mass. These nutrients are processed by the bacteria into forms that can then pass through the mucosal layer, where they are taken up by the blood vessels that lie beneath this protective layer. Many gut researchers call these upper-gut bacteria “good bacteria”.
The mucous surface contains epithelial cells, which are a critical part of the barrier between the contents of the gut and the blood, lymph, and organ systems of the body. After all, when you think about it, the inside of your entire intestinal tube is OUTSIDE the body, although it passes through the body. So the walls of your gut serve to prevent materials that are outside the body from getting in – much the same as your skin. However, the mucous wall serves to allow nutrient absorption and to promote waste secretion, which means that the mucosal wall must be selectively permeable. It must allow some things through, and prevent other things from getting through.
And a healthy gut wall does just that, and it is maintained in good condition by the “good bacteria” that live on its surfaces.
Normally these “good bacteria” don’t live within the mucosal wall – they colonize its surface and work their nutrient-absorbing magic on the contents of the gut as it passes by and is ultimately expelled from the body as nutrient-exhausted waste – feces and urine. (Way too simple, I know, but this isn’t intended to be an academic paper, just a small speculative essay.)
Researchers are now, almost daily, publishing studies that show that when the mucosal wall of the Upper/Mid Gut is compromised, some of our most devastating diseases begin to appear. Crohn’s, Ulcerative Colitis, Hashimoto’s, IBS, SIBO, celiac disease, primary biliary cirrhosis, atherosclerosis, and – some believe – Alzheimer’s. That’s the short list.
There are an increasing number of studies into how the mucosal wall is breached – a condition that some call “Leaky Gut”, but almost all of these breaches begin with a disturbance in the Gut Microbiome.
A common breaching event occurs when a person is administered a heavy dose of antibiotics to deal with an attack on the body by dangerous outside bacteria like Staph, for example. Unfortunately because of the increasing heavy doses of ever more powerful antibiotics needed to deal with increasingly resistant invaders, many of the “good bacteria” in the upper and mid-gut are also wiped out, along with the epithelial cells in the mucosal lining.
So far I haven’t mentioned the lower gut and its denizens, called “Bad Bacteria” by many scientists. Bugs like C. Dificil and Klebsiella, to name just two of hundreds of these lower intestine bugs, normally stay in place and perform all kinds of functions that are essential to successful elimination of waste from the body. In that sense they are not “bad”, because as long as they stay put and do what they are supposed to do, they are behaving themselves and causing no harm.
However, these “Bad Bugs” are also much stronger than the “Good Bugs” that dwell upstairs, so in the event of a whole body antibiotic assault far more of them survive. But that’s not the end of the story. They not only survive, they sense newly vacated territory in the upper gut and they begin migrating and establishing colonies. These bacteria – now earning their designation as “bad” – are not content to live peacefully on the surface of the mucosal lining of the upper gut. Because the lower gut has a completely different kind of lining, the “Bad Bacteria” begin burrowing into the mucosal wall of the upper gut – for reasons that are not yet understood. Some researchers say it is because the mucosal wall offers them a way to strengthen their foothold in the new territory; others say it is because the mucous is yummy. Whatever the reason, these “Bad Bacteria” soon eat through the epithelial cells and mucous lining of the upper gut and – voila – the selectively permeable barrier is no longer selective. All kinds of substances from the “Luminal Mass” can transit directly through the gut wall and into the bloodstream, setting into motion a furious reaction by both the body’s immune system and its endocrine systems which recognize these substances as things that should not ever be inside the body, and the body’s defenses immediately attack. And because the person inside whom this is happening continues to eat and drink, the substances keep leaking through the gut wall and the body’s defenses keep ramping up their responses to the highest possible levels.
Just one brief example – in Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis, what appears to happen is that when the Gut Wall is compromised and certain proteins begin “leaking” through into the blood, the body’s immune system begins attacking these foreign proteins – primarily the gluten protein molecule from grains. Unfortunately, the gluten molecule is almost identical to a thyroid gland tissue molecule, and so the body’s immune system, alerted to the foreign invader gluten protein molecule, also begins attacking and destroying the Thyroid gland tissue. Voila – Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis. If not checked, the immune system will ultimately destroy the Thyroid gland in its misguided mission to protect the body from foreign, and therefore dangerous proteins circulating in the blood and lymphatic systems.
This never would have happened if the gut wall had not been breached, and in almost every case this breach is the consequence of colonization of the upper gut by “bad” bacteria.
Zap – You’re Emulsified
Antibiotic overdose and upward migration of “Bad Bacteria” are not the only identified causes of “Leaky Gut” and its disastrous consequences. For example, an extremely interesting new research paper shows that several of the common emulsifiers used in food manufacturing to keep ingredients from separating such as polysorbate 80, lecithin, carrageenan, polyglycerols, and xanthan and other “gums,” wreck havoc with the gut. In lab animals. This research found that polysorbate 80 (common in ice cream) and carboxymethylcellulose altered microbiota in a way that caused chronic inflammation.
They also found that mice with abnormal immune systems fed emulsifiers developed chronic colitis, while those with normal immune systems developed mild intestinal inflammation and a metabolic disorder that caused them to eat more, and become obese, hyperglycemic, and insulin resistant.
The conclusion of this research seems to be that “emulsifiers” in food somehow “emulsify” the mucosal wall of the gut. Well all I can say is “Duh”.
In Conclusion
The Human Gut has evolved over millions of years into a remarkable organ that, in a natural world, is fully capable of protecting the body that serves as its host from virtually any biological or chemical threat found in that natural world. When the Microbiome of the gut is in balance within itself, the entire organism of the body tends to be in balance with the environment.
However, as ‘civilization’ has evolved, and especially since the industrial and scientific revolutions have changed the natural world irrevocably, the Human Gut has simply not had time to adapt and therefore, like the rest of the Human body, it has increasingly fallen victim to both the deliberate creations of these revolutions like antibiotics and processed foods as well as to the waste products of the revolutions like chemical and biological pollution of the air, water and earth.
As the saying goes, we are what we eat, and if what we eat is instead eating us from the inside, there is little hope for a solution coming from our scientific and industrial revolutions. If there is a solution perhaps it will come from reaching back into time and understanding the relevance of at least some of the old ways to our contemporary dilemmas. Surely Mama Coca, just like Mother Nature, is waiting there to help us, if we have the will and wisdom to seek her help.
