CHAPTER 15 Alternative Remedies
FOR TWENTY-THREE YEARS, my father suffered from Parkinson’s disease, a chronic, disabling brain disorder to which he eventually succumbed. Muhammad Ali, Janet Reno, and Michael J. Fox are among the prominent people who suffer from this illness. Parkinson’s disease is caused by a deficiency of the neurotransmitter dopamine. The most widely used Western or “allopathic” treatment, Sinemet, is a combination of levodopa and carbidopa that works by increasing dopamine levels within the brain. This is by no means a perfect treatment, and at best staves off a few of the more nasty features of the illness. An episode that occurred early in the course of my father’s illness helps to illustrate one facet of alternative medications in enhancing brain function.
A few years after my father developed Parkinson’s disease, during one of my annual visits to my parents’ house, I strolled in to see my mother in her bedroom. She was clad in a faded off-white sari, her domestic dress as per traditional custom. She sat cross-legged on the floor with two small mounds of silvery metallic powder laid out on a sprawling piece of paper. She was meticulously mixing the shiny substances together. She wasn’t happy about my intrusion, and quickly tried to wrap up and hide the telltale material. I immediately guessed what was happening. In her frustration at the lack of response in my father’s symptoms to Sinemet, she had turned to Ayurveda, the ancient art of
medicine laid out in the encyclopedic Hindu texts, the Vedas. The shiny gleam in the metallic powder made me fear that toxic metals like mercury or lead might be hiding within. During my medical internship year in a rural setting in south- ern India, I had learned firsthand of the rapaciousness of fake Ayurvedic practitioners who thought nothing of adulterating historic remedies with their own brand of poison, purely for the sake of pocketing a few extra rupees. Heavy metal therapy is not unknown even in Western medicine, where injections of gold— yes, metallic gold— have been used successfully to treat severe rheumatoid
arthritis. On the other hand, heavy metals can actually worsen Parkinson’s disease, and I knew that Ayurveda had no effective treatment for this condition. I had a heated argument with my mother, and for a change, I won. She is well educated and knew about the toxicity of heavy metals like lead and mercury, but the tragedy of my father’s illness had clouded her judgment and led her to desperately
seek a remedy that might prove to be better than the standard medication, Sinemet.
The next example reveals the other side of the coin: an Ayurvedic preparation with potential promemory effects.
BR-16A: Travails of a Promemory Ayurvedic Preparation
A former colleague of mine, Dr. Chittaranjan Andrade, has studied an Ayurvedic preparation that now goes by its modern name, BR-16A. In controlled animal experiments, he showed that BR-16A improved learning and reversed short-term memory deficits in mice. But when he approached the four manufacturers of BR -16A in India, none of them were willing to fund further basic research to find out which of the twenty or more ingredients in the substance was responsible for improving memory. They also refused to fund controlled clinical studies in patients, because if one of the companies invested a large amount of money in research on BR-16A, any positive results obtained would translate into free profits for the other three manufacturers that had not invested in the research effort. As Chittaranjan discovered to his chagrin, it is virtually impossible to get financial support to conduct large-scale, systematic studies of Ayurvedic and other traditional medications. His basic science research on BR-16A is solid, and I think it is unfortunate that clinical development of this potential anti-memory-loss agent has been stopped in its tracks. “Memory-Plus,” which contains the traditional medication “Brahmi,” is also marketed in India, but the evidence supporting its use is much flimsier than with BR-16A.
Taken From: The Memory Program How to Prevent Memory Loss
and Enhance Memory Power
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