Thunder God Vine Extract Treating Cancer In China?
In America, cancer treatment is a chemical war fought on the field of the body. Typical of war, it consists of “who has the bigger bomb”, chemotherapy, or the cancer cells? While this war is raging, the body suffers in the very same way the land suffers when war is waged upon it in the outside world – it is left barren, broken and in desperate need of true healing.
Unless, perhaps, you live in China.
Chinese Herbal medicine is a deep and ample source both of cutting edge research and clinical application. Truly integrated cancer care exists in China – where oncologists, herbalists and acupuncturists work as a team to treat the body as a whole during cancer treatment, and thunder god vine extract is part of that treatment.
Thunder-God Vine (also known as Lei Gong Teng, Tripterygium Wilfordii) has been used for its anti-inflammatory properties in the treatment of autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and now it is now being investigated for its anti-tumor properties as well.
Lab reports by researchers at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, published as a cover story of the March issue of Nature Chemical Biology, suggests that a compound in the thunder god vine extract could be a starting point for developing new anticancer drugs.
The specific compound in the lei gong teng plant that they are looking at is called Triptolide.
“Triptolide has been shown in field mouse models to be effective against cancer, arthritis and skin graft rejection. In fact, says Liu, triptolide has been shown to block the growth of all 60 U.S. National Cancer Institute cell lines at very low doses, and even causes some of those cell lines to die. Other experiments have suggested that triptolide interferes with proteins known to activate genes, which gives Liu and colleagues an entry point into their research.” (John Hopkins Medicine).
Triptolide fights cancer by actually stopping cancer cells’ ability to create other cancer cells. According to Dr. Liu, this is why thunder god vine and its compound Triptolide is so effective as an anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer herb.
However, in America, thunder god vine is still undergoing testing, and is not approved by the FDA as a treatment for cancer yet. There is no money in herbalism like there is in big pharmaceuticals, and we all know that cancer is a BILLION dollar industry in the US. 124 billion dollars in 2012, to be exact. It’s not going to make money curing cancer with herbs. That has to be done with highly dangerous synthetic materials produced from plants and their compounds that have horrible side effects that have to be treated with yet MORE medication, and the war continues to be fought on the plains of the bodily health of Americans.
References
Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. “Solving a traditional Chinese medicine mystery: Discovery of molecular mechanism reveals antitumor possibilities.” ScienceDaily 7 March 2011. 14 March 2011. <http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/solving_a_traditional_chinese_medicine_mystery>
