Sarah Crider English 1102 Professor Campbell 23 February 2014 The Right Remedy: Medicine or Herbs?

There has been a long controversy about what is the best method to treat diseases. You have naturalists and doctors who are all for herbal remedies, and are against chemical use because of the negative side effects that are inevitable when dealing with manmade drugs. And you have scientists, researchers, and doctors who are all for the drugs that are created for some type of cure to something. They are for them because they have science to back them up as well as they products work faster than typical herbal/natural method. They have side effects, some very harmful, but they still stand by the product. The issue is what is best for the body, what is the best for the economy, what is best to get the needed results in the time that it needs. Currently western doctors are exploring other countries remedies for diseases and studying if they are more effective than our current ones. When exploring how Chinese doctors treat people they came across some effective treatments and some not. The Chinese designed the most effective anti-malarial drug available. The drug is actually an herbal medicine. They also have a cure for a certain type of leukemia. Finding this more beneficial treatment from ancient medicine gives us hope of being able to develop anti-cancer drugs, says Dr. Samuel Waxman, a professor of medicine and cancer specialist at Mount Sinai Hospital. It gives a lot of optimism of seeking other types of cancer medicines in the Chinese pharmacopdia, which many people are looking into, Waxman states. A Chinese doctor gave his patients arsenic trioxide because he did not have access to western medicines. Waxman states that this doctor kept a journal for ten years documenting the results and the doctor found that arsenic trioxide worked profoundly well. Also the side effects of this verses chemotherapy were much more tolerable according to patients.

This treatment method is much more effective than chemotherapy and with western scientist looking into this new option they how found ways to make it even more effective. They have found things to add to the treatment to make is even more effective. When looking at chronic diseases that have no cures yet to date looking into Chinese medicine would do us well. "The advantage you have when you look at some of the Chinese medicine therapies is that by and large, they are safe, as long as what you're getting doesn't have added ingredients," says Brian Berman, a professor of medicine at the University of Maryland who served as the principal investigator of two Chinese medicine research initiatives funded by the National Institutes of Health. "We need to look at what other cultures have to offer and then we need to put them through a scientifically rigorous test." Not all the techniques the Chinese use were beneficial. Such as their cures for eczema, but the knowledge gained by just quickly and superficially studying another cultures medicines resulted in many benefits. Cost is also a major determining factor in anything that people do. I cant go to the movies; I cant go on the school trip, etc: its too expensive. Thats the common thing you hear people say. It is the same for certain countries where they are trying to get treated- it is too expensive. They most recent disagreement over price is happening over the medication for patients with hepatitis C. The drug producer, Gilead Sciences, makes the hepatitis C treatment pills. Concerned people are currently fighting to make the pills more affordable for people who need them. In the United States 3 million or more people are infected with the virus, in the world there is around 150 million people with hepatitis C. The most common people who have the disease are people incarcerated or those in poverty. In Egypt, over 22% of the country has hepatitis C. The reason people in programs such as Doctors Without Borders are trying so hard

to get the price reduced? Currently in the US one pill is $1,000. And the three month treatment plan costs around $84,000. How are the poor supposed to get cured and keep from transmitting it when they cannot even begin to afford such treatment? The people who have it typically do not even have health insurance. The drug company has said they are being very generous to other countries by saying they will reduce the price to $2,000 for treatment. Since the countries they will be reducing the prices for are countries that are currently using inferior, less effective alternatives because Gilead Sciences prices are so high. Doctors are still arguing that is still too expensive for these people who need it. They say that the best thing to do is make it under $500. But it all comes back to how much it takes to manufacture the drug. The drug company has not released the information, but it can be assumed it does not take that much compared to the selling price. This opens a whole new argument about how much drugs should be, the reason most of them cost so high is not because of the manufacturing costs but because of the ridiculous amounts of money that went into the research of the drug. The idea of delinkage is strongly supported by law professor Brook Baker at Northeastern University in Boston, an adviser to Health Global Access Project. Delinkage is where it is the governments responsibility to take care of the people by funding research and development of pharmaceutical drugs. Then the responsibility of manufacturing and selling of the drugs is on the drug makers. Costs greatly affect the market for anything, medicine is one that hurts society the most. If drugs are too expensive and people become in debt just trying to become a healthy functioning citizen there is something wrong. But then there is the argument that medicine isnt certain. There is no 100% assuredness in the medical world. Patients are treated on a case by case basis. What might work best for one person wont for the next. Another major thing that helped prove

the uncertainty is the recent disagreement over what experts label as high blood pressure. They have showed that they are unsure what exactly the ideal blood pressure is for people. This uncertainty secret has been revealed in a very public disagreement among experts about who should be treated for high blood pressure. The controversy hinges on the level of blood pressure that should serve as a trigger for treatment, states Yale cardiologist, Harlan Krumholz. Experts recently published that the systolic blood pressure should be 150 or less, were previously it had been 140 or less. Some of the experts who worked on article do not abide by its content. With their names still on the publication they are resorting to the old guidelines, the target should be 140 or less on the top blood pressure number. Krumholz says Although it's uncomfortable to be made aware of disagreements in medicine, patients should know that differences of opinion in medicine are common. What is rare is to have these differences explicitly acknowledged. The way to overcome this he goes on to say is for doctors to have a level of comfort in the uncertainty of medicines, also, for doctors to help guide patients to find the best option for them. When looking at these things it leads to more questions, more things to learn about what the future of medicine could hold. And even what exactly is the better option. Both pharmaceuticals and natural medications have their ups and downs. Costs depend on many variables and everything regarding the medicine world is not concrete. So in the end, medicine and herbs are both methods that can help cure illness; however, nothing is a guarantee, its all relative to the patient and what works for them.