The Best of Both Worlds

This is page 4 of a four-part article.

Mixing drugs and herbs may be useful sometimes. Many years ago, when I toured China for Nature's Sunshine Products, I learned that the Chinese were taking Western drugs and mixing them into herbal bases to help counteract their side effects. It seems like a perfectly legitimate option to me. Again, there is that eclectic viewpoint asserting itself. While I personally avoid drugs, I realize that sometimes they are necessary. So, why not use herbs to mediate their side effects? It's something I find myself doing at times for people anyway.

However, it still upsets me when people call products like IGF-1, DHEA, Sam-e, etc. “natural.” I'm not saying they are necessarily bad—they are probably safer than the purely synthetic drugs. It's just that once we've reached that stage of processing, we've left nature behind. Nature never presents us with a singular chemical substance—it always presents us with a kind of chemical “soup”—a mixture of hundreds or even thousands of substances.

Is it Still Safe?

Now, we come to the million-dollar question: are these isolates safe? When used properly, of course they can be. There are times when isolates are necessary. The more out of balance the body is, the more it may need something strong and concentrated to stabilize it. So, such substances may be therapeutically useful. But should they be taken long term as a permanent solution? Probably not. They should be used to stabilize the situation while we tackle it from a deeper level with nutrition, lifestyle changes and milder herbs so we can bring the body back into a more permanent state of balance.

The Paw Paw Cell Reg product marketed by Nature's Sunshine is a good example of this.  It's a partial extract of paw paw, not the whole plant material, but it is still a complex extract containing multiple chemicals. I've reviewed the research on paw paw extract, and it appears to be safe to take as a medicine (3rd degree remedy), meaning it has no serious toxicity but wouldn't be something you'd consume regularly for food. I really like this product because it can be effective against cancer and some other serious health problems. Since the presence of cancer indicates a very serious imbalance in the body, a standardized extract of a stronger medicine—paw paw extract—is very appropriate here.

Will paw paw extract correct the underlying lifestyle and nutritional imbalances that lead to the development of cancer in the first place? Absolutely not. And that's the whole point of this article. The more serious the imbalance, the more we may need strong remedies (3rd and 4th degree medicines) and perhaps even isolates, but that isn't really dealing with the cause. Everyone needs to learn to use foods and medicinal foods more regularly (in their more whole and natural forms) to keep their bodies strong in the first place.

That's the beauty of having an Eclectic viewpoint. One can take the best that's out there and explore options. Too often we try to make everything black and white and judge things arbitrarily without examining all the facts and all the options. We need to drink deeply from the spring of knowledge, for as a wise philosopher once stated, “shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, while drinking deeply largely sobers us up again.”