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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

Couldn’t the patient just take a bunch of the milk thistle supplements available at most pharmacies?

"derived from the milk thistle plant" likely involves more than just "eat some powered plant"; Wikipedia seems to indicate it involves more purification steps than the supplement form of things.

There’s a difference between purifying and using something as a basis for synthesis.

The question is, why not the plant itself? (Dried and powdered in a readily available pill)

Dose is probably really low if you just used dried milk thistle and you need to refining and purify it to take via an IV. Same goes with acetylcysteine for Tylenol a overdose, you need to get it via an IV and you can’t just take the over the counter supplement.

Also, every household that has Tylenol should have, and co-administer, N-acetyl-cysteine (NAC) because it's hepatoprotective. The stinky sulfurous supplement that the FDA partially banned.

Silychristin[0] and mycotoxins[1]?

[0]: https://academic.oup.com/endo/article/157/4/1694/2422745?log... [1]: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jafc.5b02105

Or like the cancer drug from yews takes something like a handful of trees per patient. You’re not just gonna chew on few cubic feet of bark.

That will kill you. Taxus baccata is highly toxic... “slips of yew, silvered in the moon's eclipse” and all that.

I should have said “took” as I learned recently that they now synthesize the chemical directly.

You often have to leach something out of a plant to get to the good stuff without damaging your liver of kidneys with the bad stuff.

The blurb notes this drug is given intravenously; it's also possible that there's plenty of it in a raw milk thistle, but eating it doesn't work. (Or, of course, that there isn't much if any in a raw milk thistle, and eating it doesn't work.)

Given the link between milk thistle usage over time and thyroid disorder, I'm amazed it's available.

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