Hacker News Reader

Comment by guybrushT | Hacker News Reader

I hope this prize leads to a more systematic (re)look at traditional medicine - both Chinese and Indian. It would be important (and exciting) to understand what thousands of years of 'wisdom' can offer modern science and the drug industry.

Can we discover new active ingredients by studying 'traditional' medicine? Should there be a branch of study dedicated to this?

View on HN

Other comments have covered this angle already; we do actively look at herbs, "traditional", and "plant-based" cures. The vast majority (99.9%+) do absolutely nothing. The tiny percentage that have some effectiveness are usually just starting points.

In fact this woman's discovery is exactly that because the malaria parasite is already developing resistance to it which is why the recommended therapy combines it with other drugs to prevent a resistant strain from spreading. That doesn't belittle her accomplishment by any means, but if you stop to check under rocks you'll occasionally find some money hidden there. Doesn't mean we can find billions in free $$$ by sending an army of people out into the world to turn stones.

Much like pyrethrin-based insecticides, this chemical is already being studied and modified in an attempt to discover variants that are easier to make, have fewer side effects, or which organisms can't develop resistance against quite as easily.

> if you stop to check under rocks you'll occasionally find some money hidden there. Doesn't mean we can find billions in free $$$ by sending an army of people out into the world to turn stones.

I really like this analogy!

This is being done:

India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Knowledge_Digital_....

China: research into TCM happens a lot, even in Western laboratories

Amazonian and African plants are cataloged and analyzed for the pharmacological properties. I cannot name specific research projects, but plenty of books from respectable sources can be found. When traveling the Amazon I even met some pharmacologists who scout for plants (all but one working for pharmaceutical companies).

Unfortunately the alternative healing movement got a 20 or 30 year head-start and thus the hardest part for the interested amateur pharmacologist is filtering out all the pseudo-scientific publications in that field. It's not all bad, a lot is even useful as a starting point for serious research, but hard facts are hard to come by.

> the alternative healing movement got a 20 or 30 year head-start

I don't think it's really meaningful to say that. To start with, what do you mean by "alternative healing movement"? The label didn't start being used until the latter half of the 1900s. But many of the practice and of course many of the inspirations are a lot older.

On the other hand, ethnobotanists have been cataloging pharmacological properties for over a century. Indeed, this Nobel Prize is for similar research done in the 1960s, so to say 'a 20 or 30 year head-start' would be to say the alternative healing movement started doing this no later than the 1940s.

The confounding problem is that herbalism is a much older practice, with a recorded history stretching back 1000s of years. When did the alternative healing movement not use herbalism?

I don't know enough about the history to really clear things up, but I can point to the 1987 essay on various aspects of the traditional medicinal aspects of celery - http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v8p164y1985.pdf - to show that it's hard to say that the modern alternative healing movement added anything new to the long and world-wide herbalist tradition.

> The label didn't start being used until the latter half of the 1900s

Yes, I am referring to the group(s) that applied that label to themselves, not to herbalists as a whole, but to groups that elevated wishful thinking and superstition to "facts". They always had cures for aids, cancer or you-name-it, based on "nobody of the natives who used the plant ever had it" (reality: were never diagnosed because they never saw a doctor).

I am talking about the groups that give every scientific mind the creeps and that harmed traditional medicine by putting it into the esoteric corner. But as I said, even these groups added some value - if only by collecting hints at useful plants and their applications that can serve as a starting point for further (actual) research.

My personal low was a Swiss "healer" who attributed the pain-killing effect of cloves to their shape - the discussion turned really nasty when I pointed her at Eugenol (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenol).

The personal highlight was the Moroccan herbalist in Fez, who knew the limits of what he can do, knew the pharmacology (to some degree) behind his plants and always could explain why they did things the way they did (and it's not "because tradition"...)

Then I am certain that the scientific cataloging and analysis of the the pharmacological properties of traditional medicines started before the alternative medicine movement.

For example, "Ethobotany of the Tewa Indians" (1916) at http://www.swsbm.com/Ethnobotany/Tewa_Ethnobotany-1.pdf starts:

> ETHNOBOTANY is virtually a new field of research, a field which, if investigated thoroughly and systematically, will yield results of great value to the ethnologist and incidentally also to the botanist. Ethnobotany is a science, consequently scientific methods of study and investigation must be adopted and adhered to as strictly as in any of the older divisions of scientific work. It is a comparatively easy matter for one to collect plants, to procure their names from the Indians, then to send the plants to a botanist for determination, and ultimately to formulate a list of plants and their accompanying Indian names, with some notes regarding their medicinal and other uses. ...

> Ethnobotanical research is concerned with several important questions: (a) What are primitive ideas and conceptions of plant life? (b) What are the effects of a given plant environment on the lives, customs, religion, thoughts, and everyday practical affairs of the people studied ? (c) What use do they make of the plants about them for food, for medicine, for material culture, for ceremonial purposes? ....

http://www.swsbm.com/Ethnobotany/Tewa_Ethnobotany-2.pdf has more details about specific applications.

So you can see already by this time scientists were collecting this sort of information.

Ive heard of people who dedicate their studies to this. Also Ive an anthropologist friend who spent time living in a developing country studying how people culture blended their traditional vs modern medicine usage.

IMO a real boon for medicine will be increasing sophisticated personal monitoring and the data this makes accessible to the world when shared. If sure we'll see some amazing cause/effect relationships from all sort of areas being identified in coming years .

In China, at present, we have some institutes conducting the research of using modern scientific process to extract the essence of traditional plant.

Hopefully some would show the true effect to the human beings

can we patent them? or is traditional going to be considered prior art? because I don't see big pharma jumping in without profit and with all the regulations around it it's going to be very hard to pay for all the tests for societies not part of the big entourage.

Obamacare reimburses alternative medecines already so the harm is already done

There already is; it's called organic chemistry. Completely synthetic medicines are a relatively new thing; for hundreds of years chemists have tested everything they could get their hands on for everything they could think of. Even so, novel natural products are discovered every year, and new uses for them likewise. Even those are usually synthesized, however, for cost reasons. If you find something interesting by grinding up sea sponges or something then you'd better hope you can synthesize it, or you'll never have enough to be useful. Also, if you can synthesize it then you can try a bunch of different modifications to it, and possibly find something similar which works even better. Evolution gives you random scatter-shot of chemicals; it's as likely to miss a really good one as it is to find it. (Plus the sea sponges and algae and so on are all optimizing for their own survival, not biocompatibility with humans.)

The only difference between medicine and "traditional" medicine is that "traditional" medicines are never discarded once they're proven to be ineffective.

The cool thing about the modern way of approaching natural products is that it's reaching far beyond what traditional herbal medicine is able to. Case in point, I heard of a promising new antibiotic that originated from a soil bacterium found in a random grassy field in the US somewhere. The latest edition of Foreign Policy has a good piece on these things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teixobactin

The origin of that antibiotic is notable for the new method of culturing the soil bacteria in situ, but antibiotics from soil bacteria are not new. Most antibiotics with a name ending in "mycin" were isolated from soil bacteria.

In many cases , the right method to test medicinal properties of plants is to break them into their contituents and test each separately ? and you miss a lot by not doing so(although it is hard) ?

Yes. While most of the components of a plant will have no particular effect, the one component that you're looking for may be lost in the noise. Worse, it could be cancelled out by some other component or components. (Think of proteins which inactivate other proteins.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com