Treading on the Tigers Tail is a detailed deconstruction of the myth that herbs negatively interact with cancer chemotherapy, with a detailed analysis of the so called interaction between St John’s Wort and CPT 11 or irinotecan. It includes an explanation of the origins of the myth that antioxidants are “bad” to combine with chemotherapy. Technical in parts, but worth a read.
HH3 is available as a pdf download from here.
In a Herbal Hypothesis entitled MEDLINE and the Mainsteam Manufacture of Misinformation, we documented, as an aside, how mainstream medical journals in MEDLINE regularly mispell the scientific names of herbs. Not the best way really to lend credibility to your point - imagine an article on the “Dangers of Warfaring”, or “Reversing the effects of Digital Toxicity”. Uncool ? One would think - and hopefully articles with such stupid mistakes submitted for publication would be denied even a cursory glance…on their way to the trash rather than “peer review” status in MEDLINE. But wait….
In the mainstream journal departments of anti-herb propaganda and related wisdom there is an ongoing attempt to raise the bar of utter ignorance to new new heights - here the Plastic Surgery Nurses editorial guru takes the prize of the month for dyslexic biomedical buffoonery with the following gem:
WHAT are they smoking? Black cohash?
The first full month of HERBLOG led to a big increase in herbological.com site traffic too. For February, the BLOG averaged nearly 3000 hits per day. The most frequent file downloads from the herbological site were the reprint of my paper on nettle seed and creatinine clearance (344 downloads), the Weiss facsimile Chapter (289), and my Food Medicine Poison article (234) followed by Herbal Hypotheses Two with over 200 downloads in the month.
Herbal Hypothesis Two is about to appear in print the Journal of the American Herbalists Guild, and has been well received by several who have got back to me with feedback. My favorite comment came from Dr Bill Mitchell, author of Plant Medicine in Practice (see Herbalbookworm Review - Channelling Bastyr) who said it should be compulsory reading for all US citizens over the age of 18.
HH2: MEDLINE and the Mainstream Manufacture of Misinformation
New Herbal Hypotheses 2: On line prepublication
MEDLINE & The Mainstream Manufacture of Misinformation
ABSTRACT
HH2 defines and analyzes for the first time the Mainstream Manufacture of Misinformation about herbal medicine as negative propaganda about herbs which appears to be based on scientific authority of a body of scholarly literature published in medical journals indexed in MEDLINE. Definitions of science, non science, good and bad science are discussed, and the concept of “scientism” as pseudo-science is introduced. Using examples from the topic of herb-drug interactions, the MEDLINE literature is shown to be largely derivative, based upon poor quality error ridden “bad science”. The MEDLINE search engine and MESH thesaurus however confers “scientistic” or pseudoscience status to this literature. The alliance between mainstream medical establishment and pharmaceutical companies is the beneficiary and perpetrator of this process, but the MEDLINE system has hitherto not been understood as a structurally or inherently biased feature of the process. Open Access policies and the development of online informatics exemplified by Google Scholar threaten to undermine this status quo.
Download here as Herbal Hypotheses 2.pdf