Medicine Quest: In Search of Nature's Healing Secrets
Viking: 2000. 304 pp. $22.95
“If you are fat, fleshy, brightly coloured and slow moving, I want to see you,” says Dr David Newman of the National Cancer Institute, and he is not alluding here to the matriarchs of our affluent society. “There's something in you, on you, or travelling with you,” he continues, “that stops you from being eaten.” Or, as Mark Plotkin puts it in this sprightly, engrossing and often startling account of nature's bounteous therapeutic gifts to man, “the creature with the best chemistry set wins”. So, indeed, do ailing humans and, of course, the pharmaceutical companies, whose chemists toil at isolating the channel and receptor blockers, vasodilators, anticoagulants, antibiotics and anaesthetics that these animals and plants so copiously harbour. For, as Plotkin reveals, the US retail take from anticoagulants and thrombolytic agents alone passed $700 million in 1993 and is rising fast. Morphine and its relatives gross $600 million per annum, and Plotkin estimates the national cost of pain, measured by drugs, doctors' bills and lost income, at about $100 billion.
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