Over the weekend, I was in and out of the North West Naturopathic Conference. Although I did not see a lot of new information at the conference itself, a close friend and colleague of mine Dr Matthew Gowan BSC ND visiting from Toronto brought some amazing insights to my attention that I feel are too important not to share!
Dr Gowan is a first year professor of botanical medicine and pharmacology at the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine where I went to school. He is also a biochemist/biologist, like myself, but spent several years following university graduation, developing drugs for pharmaceutical giant Merck-Frost!
During our weekend of philosophizing and debating, Dr Gowan brought up some incredible new information that he came across researching for his botanical medicine class, involving the field of immunology. We spent several hours reviewing the available literature and discussing the concept of multidrug resistant pumps that allow certain bacteria to become resistant to antibiotics. During our discussions, it also can to light that cancer cells use the exact same pumps to create chemotherapeutic resistance.
In essence, multiple drug resistant bacteria and cancer cells are able to produce large amounts of specific transport proteins that can pump antibiotics and chemical therapy agents out, so these chemicals cannot build up enough toxicity in the cells to cause them to die. This has been well known for a long time. Multidrug resistant pumps create a huge problem for existing medications to be effective, which can lead to higher and higher doses of these toxic drugs to be used in order to be effective.
Of course with the greater doses of chemical agents there becomes a greater risk of toxicity within our own bodies. This pharmacodynamic problem can lead to huge issues in most people undergoing treatment for chronic infections such as Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), mycobacterium avium complex, lyme disease or undergoing chemotherapy treatments for cancer.
Anyways …. to the point. Although there is apparently no drug at this point that impacts these multidrug resistant pumps there are actually quite a few natural agents, such as Milk Thistle or Bearberry that contain compounds able to block the multidrug resistant pumps from being able to work! These agents have the potential to dramatically lower the required dose of toxic substances such as chemotherapeutic agents and antibiotics.
Although there are several mechanisms of resistance that can develop with bacteria, fungus and cancer cells, this is an amazing example of how natural compounds can have a huge supportive effect in the treatment of chronic disease.