Buhner - Herbal antivirals: natural remedies for emerging resistant & epidemic viral infections

For Our Children

It serves little purpose merely to be scared by viruses. But it serves a good deal of purpose to understand them.

Frank Ryan, MD, Virus X: Tracking the New Killer Plagues

If you arent skeptical about your skepticism, you arent a skeptic.

For several decades now, I have been deeply interested in antibiotic resistance, the intelligence of bacteria, and the use of treatment approaches that are, ultimately, more elegant than pharmaceuticals. Plant-based medicines, unlike pharmaceuticals, dont cause resistance problems, they are much safer, and they are ecologically sound they are biodegradable and renewable, which most pharmaceuticals are not.

My long-term interest in herbal antibacterials resulted, after a considerable time (and an early initial look at the topic), in a very deep exploration of systemic herbal antibacterials for resistant infections (Herbal Antibiotics, second edition, Storey Publishing, 2012). And during that exploration, many aspects of plant medicine not hitherto developed in the West began to reveal themselves (such as the importance of plant synergists).

This book is the beginning, for me, of a similar exploration into the world of viruses, emerging and resistant viral diseases, and more ecologically responsible (and often more effective) forms of treatment. In this book you will find information on some of the best broad-spectrum, systemic, antiviral herbs on Earth. As with herbal antibiotics, they are easy to use, easy to grow, and easy to make into medicines for yourself, your family, your patients. And they are very, very effective for emerging and resistant viral infections. For the plants themselves learned long ago, just as they did with bacteria, how to stop viruses from killing them. Plants cant run but they sure can do chemistry.

The concept of herbal antibiotics as primary interventives has, over the past several decades, become common in cultures outside the Western industrialized nations. Medical systems in Africa, Asia, and South and Central America are turning away from pharmaceuticals as a first-line treatment for bacterial infections because of resistance problems and, most especially, because pharmaceutical corporations make a great deal too much money off the suffering of their populations. Cultures other than those in the West have realized that they just cant afford corporate greed any longer and they are unwilling to let the poorer members of their populations die because of it. Researchers in cultures across the globe have found that plant antibacterials are often more effective than pharmaceuticals. So they are exploring which ones are most potent, which forms of preparation are most effective, and how best to grow them. Then they are traveling throughout their regions (especially in Africa), giving seeds to local villages, teaching them all they have learned, and letting them get on with their healing. There is no middleman raking off profits in the process. A new model of health care is coming into being and its about time.

It is my hope that this same kind of movement will begin in the treatment of viral diseases. (And in China, they are already years ahead of us; they see the writing on the wall.) We need a new paradigm of healing. We need new ways of thinking about viruses, their emergence, and their treatment just as we have needed them about bacteria. (Even in the herbal communities in the West, our approaches to viral infections and viruses have been extremely shallow.) There is a lot we can do to create a more effective healing paradigm in our world, one that is ecologically sustainable while at the same time being more human friendly... if we step outside the box that our thinking has been trapped by.

I hope that you find the material in this book stimulating to your thinking. I hope that you begin, yourself, to add to this emerging paradigm of healing, one that is slowly extricating itself from the outmoded thinking of the past. We have a great opportunity to create something new, something that reflects more accurately the world around us, something that truly addresses the healing needs of the people who come to us.

I think the viruses are going to be pretty insistent that we do so. And soon.

It is naive to think we can win.

David Livermore, MD

Viral diseases, caused by pathogenic virus infections which have high morbidity and mortality rates, are still the leading cause of death in humans worldwide.... Moreover, the emergence of viral resistance to drugs, as well as the serious adverse effects induced by antiviral drugs, has caused serious medical problems, particularly when [the drugs are] administered in combination over prolonged treatment periods.... And these drugs are quite costly, thus limiting their use in developing countries, where infection is most prevalent.

Kaio Kitazato et al., Viral Infectious Disease and Natural Products with Antiviral Activity

For much of the twentieth century, infectious diseases in human populations of Western countries have been in retreat, as we learnt to sanitize our cities, cleanse our water supplies, improve domestic hygiene, use antibiotics, control vector organisms and vaccinate. As a result the developed world became rather complacent, naively welcoming the false dawn of a life mostly free of infectious disease. Since the 1980s things have looked much less secure, however, with the emergence of many previously unrecognized infectious diseases, and the re-emergence of known infectious diseases that were thought to be under control. This trend has continued until the present time and many infectious pathogens, predominantly viruses, have been newly identified.

Thijs Kuiken et al., Emerging Viral Infections in a Rapidly Changing World

During the summer of 2006 a hitherto little-known viral disease swept across a large and diverse range of islands in the Indian Ocean. On the island of Runion 265,000 people became critically ill out of a population of 770,000. Very few of those infected were asymptomatic; the illness was, in nearly every case, severe. Health-care workers and the islands hospital system were overwhelmed. Even if they had not been, there was little they could do. So, they offered supportive care. In other words, they watched. They waited. Either the persons immune and bodily systems would fight it off, or they wouldnt. For many, they didnt.

The virus soon jumped to India, where an estimated 1.3 million people became ill. The culprit? A relatively little-known viral disease, chikungunya fever. The virus is known to medical science but not well; its not a common disease. But it had mutated. Later analysis showed that the mutation had occurred sometime between the spring and fall of 2005. Within 6 months it had become pandemic in the region. By the end of 2006 over two million people had become infected.

The disease is attended by severe joint pain (somewhat like dengue fever). The ankles and wrists are the most impacted; conjunctivitis and a rash often occur. The pain in the joints can last for weeks... or months, and it is debilitating. There is no treatment and there is no cure. The physicians recommended the use of acetominophen for the pain. The cause of death for many of those who died? Liver damage... from the acetominophen.

People visiting the region who traveled back to their homes in the United States and Europe brought the disease with them. Over 1,000 in the United States were diagnosed with it; person-to-person transmission occurred in a number of instances, infecting new hosts. Then, luckily for most of us, the epidemic just... faded away.