Re: pharmaceuticals and effectiveness

[Roger Key <roger.key@onet.co.uk>]

Hi All,
Paul has asked a couple of questions from a systems point of view.  A few
thoughts.
1.  I think it was Bandler, Grinder and Dilts of NLP fame who sought to
market a product called 'Placebo' to address illness.  Their argument was
that in most drug trials the placebo would have something like 30 to 50% of
the effectivness of the drug.  They proposed a range of 'drugs' that did
nothing and a set of instructins that did.  Their trial successes were as
high if not higher than the real drugs and the side effects and production
costs were very low.  They were not given the go ahead by the FDA though.
In the end they were told - off the record that they would never get
permission as they would be undermining the US drugs industry and possibly
medicine....

2.  We have a growing problem in the West with the developing resistence to
antibiotics by many organisms - of particular interest is MRSA which can
cause the closing down of whole hospital wards - this resistence has
occoured for many reasons, inappropriate prescribing, over the counter
anti-biotics, animal feed, incomplete courses etc etc etc.  This is not a
problem found in the old Soviet Union.  Why, well they did not make much
use of antibiotics rather they (unintentionally) treated one system with
another system.  They made great use of pharges, viruses that 'prey' on
bacteria.  If they came across a bacteria that was resistent to the current
culture they would develop another by the reletivly simple expedient of
feeding a pharge culture on the resistent bacteriaa untill the pharge
culture mutated to attack it.  Beingf a pharges are specific there was
little issues in giving them to humans and stock to treat illness.  However
when the Soviet block collapsed pharge production suffered.  There was
suggestions that funding could come from the west, however because of our
reductionist approach to drug administration we have a requirement for the
individual pharges to be identified and tested etc etc etc.  This kind of
misses the point and has also meant that we will not get the benefits of
pharge remidies for many years if ever.

3.  IN Central and Eastern Europe there has been a lot of study on Bee
Propolis for the treatment of a broard range of illness and disease.  A lot
of the work was done in Yugoslavia before the break up - reading a history
of propolis treatment is like reading a report from the Balkan Wars, all
the key players are / were based in the centres of violence.  Anyway if you
look on the 'net there is loads of information of the research into
propolis and an interesting insight into the different attitudes.  The
research in the West hads mainly centred oon the extraction of individual
compounds from the propolis and testing these to see which has the effect -
so a synthetic "new improved" version can be made.  In Balkan experiments
they focussed on what was working and sought to make their propolis
extracts as broad based as possible, collecting from over the whole of
Yugoslavia and combining these to gether.  True there was some analytical
work but in the main the ideal was a broard spectrum propolis product that
was useful.  The research now seems to suggest that there are some parts of
the propolis that are more potent than others but they all act as
synergists in the activity.  Also (possibly) because it is a very complex
compound of many active chemicals and is produced naturally there seems
little development of resistence in any of the organisms it is active
against.

Both pharges and propolis are very active against MRSA.

Neither is given much space in the West because analysis and syntetic
chemicals are best.

Each year many millions of bed hours are lost due to MRSA in hospitals....

All illnesses are the perfect outcome for the system that produces them.

All illnesses are the product of a system.  (I think)

Treating the symptoms is rework at best.

Preventitive treatment rather than changing the system is tampering but is
possibly better than rework.

System need systemic solutions (I think) and if we cannot change the system
to remove the illness (gene therapy?) then maybe a systemic treatment (eg
pharges, propolis) are 'better' than single chemicals.  (But no where near
as profitable!)

---------------------------------oooOOOooo--------------------------------------
Roger C. Key 				 mailto:roger.key@onet.co.uk
Prescient - The Whole as One
(44) 01639 871062
Web based training for Organisations,	 http://virtual-deming.com
Leadership and Life!