Articles on Herbs by Ingrid Naiman - Galangal, Codonopsis, and Artemisia Annua

There was a rather fantastic program on parasites on Discover Health a few years ago in which medical anthropologists, I believe from the London School of Tropical Medicine, determined that since the dawn of humanity on this Planet, two-thirds of all people who have ever been born on Earth died of malaria. It was a staggering statistic; moreover, if we have been contending with this illness for this long, it can also not really be surprising if we know something about the treatment of the illness.

Herbalists always know these things because they have had a very traditional way of writing textbooks for hundreds of years. This invariably begins with a description of the herb that includes drawings and details about the leaves, flowers, habitat, and so forth. Generally, it includes a list of names in many languages that helps us to identify the plant because long before we had Latin names for plants, we had other names. Herbalists tend to be scholarly and it would not surprise me if many them had incarnations in monasteries where they learned foreign languages and translations as well as herbal medicine and ways to care for the sick and orphaned. All of this belongs to a long tradition.

Artemisia annua is a very specific plant in a large family of plants that share some common chemical constituents but the astonishing thing is that a few years ago researchers at the University of Washington stumbled on some ancient references to Qing Hao in an archaeological treasure that was excavated. Suddenly, this famous antimalarial herb was associated with cancer treatment and it gained almost immediate government recognition, meaning, for one, that herbalists can make statements about its value without having the FTC and FDA jumping all over them. Momentum gained and production increased but demand outpaced supply so growing Artemisia annua has economic potential even if the plant is not processed in the Congo (or elsewhere) into medicine.

Before Derick and Frank left South Africa, I urged them to visit Doctors for Life because this is a wonderful group of dedicated people who are cultivating Artemisia annua and tableting it. The herbs are packaged 36 tablets to a bottle and the dosage is six per day and this absolutely astonished me. However, once I was set up in Germany with the scope I realized exactly how and why this was perfectly correct. Depending on the dosage, the parasites die within 6-36 hours. The death is followed by a bacterial "infection" during which time more and more bacteria eat the dead parasites. The patient has mild to quite heavy flu-like symptoms during this time and feels achy but usually not achy enough to want to stay in bed. By the sixth day, the white blood cells eat the bacteria and the patient feels fine. The blood looks good and there are no parasites to be found, at least not for a while.

What I discovered is that the protocols that only address the parasites fail to deal with the eggs that the parasites deposited, often under the membrane lining of the intestines. What this means is that medicines that pass through the gastrointestinal tract do not address the eggs. Parasites are smart and they have evidently had a long time not just to adapt to us but to force us to be hospitable towards them. According to veterinary textbooks, parasites control up to half the hormones in our bodies so much behavior that is governed by feelings is behavior governed by the feelings parasites want us to feel rather than what we might feel if healthy and uninfected. You can see why this subject has become so enthralling to me.

The parasites are mobile. The doctor in Germany believed that parasites would avoid arteries because the arterial pressure would annoy them. He was sure we would only find parasites in peripheral blood. We are both very curious so I just said, "we do infusions all day long here, bring me some venous blood and some arterial blood." I found them everywhere: lymphatic fluid, peripheral areas, venous and arterial blood. The only time I never found them was a week after doing a parasite cleanse or when people had very high levels of metal toxicity.

The question then arose as to whether or not one ever gets rid of them. I met people at the clinic in Bavaria who had lived in Kenya for years and in Salzburg, I met many South Africans. Some of them had been treated for malaria as many as 42 times. The issue then was whether this was 42 different mosquito bites or recurrences of the same infection. Many of the patients said that the protocol for cancer treatment was in general milder than the allopathic treatment for malaria, and this is also corroborated in the textbooks because they generally say that unless the parasitic infection is incapacitating, the treatment is worse than the disease. This is because the allopathic treatment relies on hugely toxic substances like arsenic, aluminum, and mercury, exactly the sorts of metals I had seen that inhibited the proliferation of the parasites. The problem is that the patients with the high levels of metal toxicity were suffering from very severe neurological disorders, like Parkinson's and Lou Gehrigs disease.

The first patient I saw in Germany with an enormous parasite was Italian. He had a bulging brain tumor. He had been the regional director for East Africa for PanAm and was also on the first flight to Chernobyl after that incident. He was the last surviving member of the relief team that went to Chernobyl and all the others had died of brain tumors. His name was Julian and his condition was very advanced. The parasites were huge and I watched one of them for many hours to try to understand its behavior. I asked Julian's wife if I could have a look at her blood and she had the same type of parasite but had not been on the mission to Chernobyl. Later, there was another patient, Annegret, a member of the German equestrian Olympic team, very tall, and rather remarkable looking. She had ovarian cancer and a terminal prognosis. I found the same kind of parasite and looked at her and said, "These parasites speak Swahili, have you been to Nairobi?" She said, "I lived in Mombasa for 12 years." I became more and more interested and found that this particular one is famous for hanging out in the genitalia between midnight and 2 am, but then they leave and look for food elsewhere. You can see them in ultrasounds, but only during those hours. Her MRIs and CT scans were clear, but the cancer markers were off the charts.

She had lymphatic swelling so I called the Foeldi Clinic. They said this was metastatic lymphedema and I said, "Okay, but why is it sometimes the right leg and sometimes the left." Dr. Foeldi was very courteous and said, "Dr. Naiman, you are right, she should go to the School of Tropical Medicine in Wurzburg, not our clinic." If someone has cancer, they don't usually believe they have a parasite infection, but when I tried to engage Dr. Lai, one of the two researchers from UW who reported on Qing Hao, he also could not believe that a parasite was contributing to what they believed to be cancer. However, what he told me was that Artemisinin only works sometimes, not in every case. Yes, of course, because not all cancers are parasitic but some are.

One of our group in Germany was fascinated by death and dying and had first approached me with a offer to set up a clinic for children who were dying. I told her I am interested in curing all of them, not in helping them to cross over. So, she had to choose between death and dying and healing. She decided to spend the Christmas holidays with Julian and she told me that the tumor throbbed for 20 minutes after his vital signs stopped. It was pulsing that hard and seemed to have an existence that was slightly independent of Julian. Annegret also died because she could not believe what she saw in the microscope. I even left my $25,000 scope at her home in Salzburg because I wanted her to study her blood herself.

Did I improve upon the protocol of Doctors for Life? I don't know. I correspond with them but until they see what I have now seen countless times in the scope, they are unlikely to understand what I am trying to say. What is remarkable about the whole herb as compared to the chemical isolated from the herb is that the whole herb protects against nausea, vomiting, and gripping sensations in the stomach. This is why herbs are so revered and why they should be used in their whole forms rather than subjected to the processes that isolate the so-called active ingredients. Since patients who are taking antiparasitic herbs have those flu-like symptoms, I developed a series of three different formulas to protect against internal bleeding, a hypothetical risk, anemia, and gastrointestinal distress. This is followed by an immune booster that supports the white blood cells and it's expensive compared Artemisia annua alone.

What might be slightly different also about my trio is that all parasites are destroyed and there are at least 3000 different ones. They have as much variety as snakes. Just as you have pythons and cobras and boa constrictors, you have parasites with vastly different hunting strategies, some obviously much more dangerous than others. But they could, of course, have had time to lay eggs before being vanquished by the herbs. Sometimes, the eggs hatch, the membrane lining sloughs off, and there is bleeding. It's a good time to do a flush with black walnut and sesame oil because the baby parasites are weak and easy to remove.

I have been at this for many years now and I have a few pet peeves. One of them is a sort of blasé attitude on the part of some natural healers who think the parasites arise because of the terrain. I believe this is much more likely to be true of bacteria than parasites. The parasites are introduced into the system, ingested or injected by a vector such a mosquito. They are not necessarily eating only damaged erythrocytes. Many of them are practically like vacuums sucking up dozens of red blood cells in one gulp. Others pick and choose and don't seem as hungry. They have different behavior, but experts say they mate for life. You sometimes see the mated pairs on the slides. They look terrified.

However, I want to reiterate for Regine in particular and others as well that I have given absolutely immense thought to the projects I have proposed. Artemisia annua is, as the name suggests, an annual. I have the proper seeds, the original Qing Hao from China. The crops can be sold on the international market or harvested and processed in the Congo. I know someone in Tennessee who had 2000 acres planted.

Finally, I want to say that I do understand the malaria problem. About 500 million people a year are affected, many of them children. I understand the epidemiology and complications but treating the patients after they are infected is not as valuable as protecting them from infection in the first place. Either way, we are talking about massive public information campaigns, expense, and needs. There are other treatments besides Artemisia annua. In South America, they use cinchona bark, the source of quinine. I have studied this also, very thoroughly. There are more side effects and I believe therefore that safer treatments are possible.