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Question & Answer with Chris Kilham
Natural Standard
with Dr. Catherine Ulbricht
“As long as we’re talking about prescription drugs, there is, I would say, respectfully, there is no such thing as a side effect. I think that we have been completely conned into accepting language that minimizes the very dangerous effects of a lot of drugs.” - Chris Kilham, Natural Standard

Dr. Catherine Ulbricht, Founder and CEO of Natural Standard, interviews "medicine hunter" and explorer Chris Kilham. He has trekked to over 20 countries in search of botanical medicines with proven efficacy. In this question and answer webinar, Kilham discusses the effectiveness of various botanicals, including curcumin, adaptogens and cocoa.

Catherine: Welcome to Natural Standard’s Webinar series. This is Dr. Catherine Ulbricht, Founder of Natural Standard Research Collaboration and the Journal of Dietary Supplements. We are pleased to have the world-famous Medicine Hunter Chris Kilham with us today. Chris Kilham is the Medicine Hunter and explorer. He has trekked to over 20 countries in search of botanical medicines with proven efficacy. The author of 14 books, Kilham has appeared as a guest expert on over 1,500 radio programs, so we are really lucky to get to spend some time with him today. He’s also been on more than 500 TV shows worldwide, including the Dr. Oz Show, ABC, 2020, CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, etc. It’s an honor to meet you, Chris.

Chris: Well thank you, Kate. It is such a great pleasure to be on your show today and have the opportunity to reach a lot of people.

Catherine: Thanks for joining us. I recently had the honor of meeting Dr. Oz as well. Like you, I was an invited guest on his show where we discussed the importance of speaking with your healthcare providers about alternative medicine and Natural Standard’s herb and supplement research. So I thought that interviewing you now seemed like a perfect continuation of exploring our mutual interest in natural medicine.

Chris: Wonderful. You know, I really appreciate the job that Dr. Oz does. He’s the big person in this whole field right now in terms of his ability. He’s a real friend of natural therapies, and I don’t think we could have a better-informed advocate out there in the mainstream media.

Catherine: I agree. I’ve found him to be extremely well-balanced and down to earth. He is obviously a brilliant scientist and healthcare provider, but he was also very warm and respective to fostering open communications amongst his guests and the audience and the TV viewers, and really trying to foster the idea of integrated healthcare. When we consider cardiac surgery and pharmacologic agents (like prescription drugs), we also have the opportunity for plant-based medicines, functional foods, and dietary supplements from natural origins, which I think, gives consumers today a wide array of opportunities to really personalize their healthcare regimen and do what’s best for them. I think it also has important socioeconomic ramifications if we could use some of these plant medicines that you have spent your time exploring and researching and save some money and keep our insurance cost down and focus on prevention; that it’s all good. So we are just thrilled about what both you and Dr. Oz are doing. We’d like to dig a little deeper into your life now, if you don’t mind and snoop around and ask you some specific questions about your area of expertise.

Chris: Sure, go for it. I’m pleased to answer any questions for you.

Catherine: You’ve spent your life uncovering the secrets of plant medicines. How effective are they in treating common health problems?

Chris: Well, just to put it into a little bit of context; plant medicines are the most widely used medicines in the entire world. So many more people are using plants as medicines and preparations of plants than are using what we think of as modern drugs, pharmaceuticals. And it’s the largest category of medicine on Earth. There are, at this point in time, I’d say generously tens of thousands of some of the highest level scientist in the world just working on plant medicines and publishing profusely all over the place. This is a monster, monster area of healthcare, and plant medicines have always, up until very recently, been the sources
from which pharmaceuticals have been made (e.g., different alkaloids from plants for blood pressure and a number of things).

So, following in the long, long tradition and hardcore science of plant medicine, I go out to find things that maybe already have larger or very large bodies of modern science behind them, but simply aren’t known in this culture or in Europe, and I help to get a plant (whether it’s from Siberia or the South Pacific or the Amazon Rain Forest, or some place), bring it into the market, and give people a better health choice. It’s often a better choice than pharmaceutical agents that might be somewhat or very toxic.

I hopefully do something good for the environment in the process of this work – somehow preserving the natural environment – and I also work with people in indigenous situations to improve their fortune by paying higher wages and that kind of thing. It’s an actual holistic health approach – the ongoing issue of dealing with people’s individual health through the medicine they have access to.

Catherine: That’s terrific. With aiding and discovery, a lot of therapies that are FDA-regulated now are actually based on plants. Like willow bark, where aspirin comes from and the yew tree is where Taxol, a lifesaving chemotherapy drug was developed from. I think it’s very important what you say how in other countries, a lot of these people are benefiting from these therapies and America might be slow to catch on. For example, in China or some parts of Europe or Canada, plant-based therapies are often the standard of care or first-line therapy as opposed to a prescription drug. Then, like you said, we can keep down toxicities and prevent adverse effects and interactions often. I’m not saying I am recommending natural products necessarily over a prescription drug if the science supports that a prescription drug is effective, but I often think they have a crucial place as adjunct or things to help prevent or aid in side effects from prescription drugs.

Chris: As long as we’re talking about prescription drugs, there is, I would say, respectfully, there is no such thing as a side effect. I think that we have been completely conned into accepting language that minimizes the very dangerous effects of a lot of drugs. We have seen more studies on how the non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, basically the over-the-counter pain relievers that people have been taking every day are even worst for cardiovascular health than we already knew. And these things keep coming out; these are not side effects, these are effects. The fact is there is an immense, immense problem of toxicity and mortality to pharmaceutical drugs. And yes, many pharmaceutical drugs have saved lives, especially antibiotics and vaccines. So I’m not a total drug-basher. When you look at the approximately 300,000 Americans who die every year from the proper use of over-the-counter and prescription drugs: most years, not one single American dies from using herbs. There’s no question that we have the grave safety issue with drugs, and we have a really good safety record with herbs. So part of the imperative is to make sure people actually have vastly safer options, and we see toxicity studies on many of the botanicals showing vastly greater safety and comparatively fewer interactions than with any of the drugs. So we’re talking hardcore safety in the addition to the continuation of traditional use.

Catherine: Right, there is an acronym GRAS status (generally recognized as safe). There are a lot of these plant-based products like turmeric (which we are going to talk about in a little bit) fenugreek, a lot of Indian spices; for example, a lot of different berries (blueberry, cranberry, pomegranate), a lot of the fruits as well have very safe ingestion profiles, even in large amounts well beyond what is commonly found in food, and people can grow these in their own gardens, and I really like the theme you interjected about being good for the environment and ecologically correct as well – preventing waste, being able to harvest some of these on your own. I thought that was a good point.

Chris: Yeah, I think there are a lot of home gardeners who grow herbs and wind up making their own herbal teas. We know, thanks to a lot of investigative work that’s been done by good scientists all over the place, that most of the traditional herbal teas have exactly the properties they have always been used for. And so people can grow their peppermint for digestion, and they can make herbal tea at home from ginger that they grow or that they just buy in the supermarket. A lot of the options available to people are simple and unquestionably proven safe. Part of my thing is to go to countries where may be something has been extensively used by huge populations of people for a long time but still doesn’t have any popularity here, you know, and help to translate that into availability in this market; that’s one of the big things I’m up to most of the time.

Catherine: So we’ve touched on safety a bit. Now what, as far as efficacy, what are some of the most powerful plant medicines you’ve experienced in the world and why?

Chris: Well, I think that a lot of the, a lot of the most powerful plant medicines that I’ve experienced are in a group known as the adaptogens. When you look at plant medicine worldwide, there are about 50,000 plants that are used for some medicinal purpose or another. And of them, maybe eight are in this class called Adaptogens. Basically, what that name means is that these plants (which are mostly from northern Asia, but not entirely), help us to adapt to stress, physically and mentally. And they do so by lowering stress hormones in the blood and by affecting in positive ways stress centers in the brain, and they also enhance energy and endurance, improve mood, and they are really quite remarkable. So I have spent a number of years working with this group of herbs that include: Rhodiola rosea and Ashwagandha and Schisandra and a number of herbs that are available in this market.

And what I like about the adaptogens, and why I prize them so highly, is that they give people a positive experience. If you take something like Rhodiola rosea, if you take something like Schisandra chinensis, if you take one of these adaptogenic herbs and do so in a sufficient enough form and quality, you are going to have an experience. You are not going to just take it with an assumption that it’s good for you and hope that so; you are going to feel more energetic; you are going to feel more mentally alert. These are wonderful herbs, for not only delivering vitality, which all people want (all people want to feel good), but also for giving people an experience of efficacy so they say, “OK, I get it. These herbs, this stuff, really work.” Just like if you’re nauseous and you drink some ginger tea, and it quells your
stomachache; you go, “Oh, OK, I get it; herbs really work.” So I like this whole adaptogenic class of herbs because they make people feel heroically good. They are beneficial for a multitude of purposes, and they demonstrate, each demonstrates literally thousands of years of safe uses.

Catherine: Interesting. I know another therapy that we are hearing a lot about is Curcumin; it is sort of a miracle herb. I know that turmeric, which I mentioned before, in Indian food, which I like, is a spice that is commonly used in Asian foods that comes from the root of turmeric or the Curcuma longa plant, which is the member of the ginger family, which you mentioned. The curcumin the yellow-colored constituent in the turmeric that’s commonly is used to color foods and cosmetics. But from a therapeutic potential, what is the safety and efficacy profile of curcumin?

Chris: Well, curcumin is about, you could say, as safe as celery. Turmeric roots, which you just described what curcumin is derived from, turmeric is a vegetable. For the people in Southeast Asia, (unlike us, where we might chop up half of a turmeric root to put in a curry), they take pound or half a kilo of the stuff and chop it up, and eat it as a vegetable. So, this is a very, very safe plant that demonstrates extraordinary activity as an antioxidant; it protects cells from premature destruction.

And it’s an anti-inflammatory, and this is its greatest-of-all uses because the anti-inflammatory drugs that are in the market are getting hammered by medical science for good reason. They cause very serious negative effects. And one of the beautiful things about curcumin derived from turmeric is that it demonstrates profound pain-relieving properties, anti-inflammatory pain-relieving properties, but the actual biological activity of this stuff is greater than that of any known anti-inflammatory drug. What I mean by that is, you have many drugs for example, that go after a particular enzyme, but we know from studies that have been conducted on curcumin, which is one of the most extensively studied and published on medicinal agents in the world, that this interacts with every known parameter of inflammation. All of the other factors that contribute to inflammation, it interacts with it as well. So it’s very broad. I personally believe that curcumin is the greatest pain-relieving agent that we have in the plant kingdom with the possible exception being cat’s claw from the Amazon. This, in addition, it protects the liver. It has tremendous benefits for the immune system, the cardiovascular system. Curcumin has really emerged as one of the most studied and most beneficial of all known agents from plants. So I have really high regard for it. And I also think that since people are a little bit in crisis right now, in terms of not wanting to have cardiovascular problems or other problems due taking something like ibuprofen or acetaminophen. The natural anti-inflammatory plants like curcumin from turmeric become very appealing options because they are safe, and not only do they work without the negative effects, but they also actually impart broad benefits to health. This is a different way of thinking about a medicine. It’s not just something that stops the pain, but it’s actually something that promotes health throughout most of the organs systems in the body.

Catherine: Well, I love also how some of the prescription drugs and over-the-counter and NSAIDs pain relievers out there are actually well known to create gastrointestinal intestinal or GI upset, while curcumin has actually been used in traditional Asian medicine to treat GI upset. And there is human evidence suggesting that it might be helpful in managing several medical conditions, including dyspepsia, osteoarthritis, and on the cardiovascular disease front – hyperlipidemia. Like you are saying, you know it can be helpful for a number of purposes as opposed to one, so you get more for your money, so to speak. Like the adaptogens you were discussing, curcumin has also been used for low energy, so it’s sort of a feel-good plant as well in addition to the anti-proliferative, neuro-protective properties.

Chris: Yes, this is definitely one of the great big amazing medicines that we have available to us in nature’s pharmacy. And I appreciate it not only for its safety and its efficacy, but also because it’s just further proof that plant medicines work. And I want people to have a positive experience when they take a plant medicine. I want them to, you know, feel relief from whatever it is they are dealing with. Feel better than they did before, suffer no negative effects as a result of the medicine, and have a positive experience because this is really possible. When you really think about it, a great majority of medicines available, even if they do relieve the symptoms for which they are used, they don’t additionally promote health in some way. And what’s true for most of the plant medicine is that compounds in them like antioxidants and anti-inflammatory agents and circulation-enhancing agents, and other factors enhance health in a multitude of ways. So, they make a contribution to overall wellbeing, and that I think is the great, the greatest benefit of the whole plant medicine category.

Catherine: The bigger picture, I agree. We understand that you’ve recently returned from a visit to the Kuna Indians off the coast of Panama. Can you tell us a little bit about that trip?

Chris: I work with different companies on different projects to bring some of these things to market. Am I allowed to mention curcumin that I admire or no?

Catherine: It’s your interview.

Chris: I like the product Curamin by EuroPharma. I have some pain from the days of my martial arts practice, pain from injury. I don’t want to take the non-steroidal inflammatory drugs. I’ve used the Curamin product for quite a few months now. I find it vastly effective. I think it’s a good example of a natural product that actually works and works quickly. So when people are looking around, I want them to be guided, at least know about truly effective products.

But getting to your point about cocoa, I was down in both Ecuador and Panama on behalf of a company called Reserveage Organics. And maybe you know them for their Resveratrol products. But in any case, we were investigating cocoa because in Panama there’s group of people called the Kuna Indians. They’re indigenous to a central region in Panama, and they have among the world’s lowest rates of heart attack, stroke, and high blood pressure, among the lowest rates of diabetes, and very low rates of certain types of cancer. So these people are a medical anomaly, and for about 20 years, Harvard Medical researchers (mostly under the direction of a man named Dr. Norman Hollenberg) have been investigating the Kuna. What they know is that the Kuna consume more cocoa, actually hot chocolate every day, than any group of people in the world. And there’s substantial corroboration that it is the very high intake of cocoa that’s responsible for the very, very low rates of certain diseases that these people have. Even though they are poor and lack sanitation, and they don’t have good access to medicine; they don’t get a lot of the killer diseases. So, we were down there investigating their communities.

In Ecuador I was actually helping source organic cocoa for a project called CocoaWell. But in Panama, it was investigating the Kuna native people themselves, seeing how they make their hot cocoa, which is really fascinating. They boil a pot of water, they add bananas to it. They cook the bananas until they basically break apart. And then they add a great big load of freshly ground cocoa beans, and they cook it and cook it and cook it, and then they strain it and drink that. They don’t have access to milk and they don’t have access to sugar because that is expensive. So they use bananas instead, it’s really, really delicious stuff, and they drink 4 or 5 cups of this a day. And so we were really learning how cocoa is integrated into their lives and all is part of getting healthier cocoa-based products out to the market. I’m always working on something that will hopefully deliver something to the market at some point.

Catherine: Well you can see from being a pharmacist myself, from a pharmacologic basis or a mechanism-of-action basis, you can see how this would work in your body from a scientific perspective as well because it’s in the methylxanthine family. So it’s related to caffeine and theophylline, which is a therapy used for asthma. You can see how these benefits might actually work inside the human anatomy aside from tasting delicious and being locally attainable, and economically and environmentally viable.

Chris: Well, in the case of cocoa, Kate, everybody is racing around trying to find the big super-fruit. Well mine is higher in antioxidant value than yours. There is no super-fruit that is more super than cocoa. There is no food that is more nutritious than cocoa. Cocoa is the king of all foods and fruits in terms of its antioxidant activity, in terms of its protective powers. It’s just packed with flavonols, and flavonols have showed up repeatedly to be key agents in protections. Flavonols are largely responsible for the benefits of green tea, acai, and for a number of critically beneficial plants. What we know now, that we didn’t know up until the last bunch of years, is that cocoa really is just about the single healthiest thing you can put in your mouth after water. You really can’t conjure something else that is healthier than cocoa. This is not only a remarkable turn of events, but it has opened the door to a lot of new ideas. The Mars Corporation (as in M&Ms) has a high-flavonoids cocoa product they call Cocoa Vida. And Hershey just teamed up with Honest Tea to come out with a cocoa-based nutraceutical drink. And I’ve been working with CocoaWell, which is a group of cocoa high flavonols cocoa-based product. And we are seeing the beginning now of this emerging field of cocoa nutraceuticals. So in addition to people being able to eat their semi-sweet dark chocolate, which I highly recommend, and, I’m not suggesting anybody should substitute a supplement for a good-tasting chocolate, God forbid. And in addition to drinking your hot cocoa, and to taking unsweetened cocoa and tossing it into blender drinks, making sure you are getting absolute advantage of what really is the greatest of super foods. On top of that, you know, people are going to get mood-enhancing benefits because of the very well-studied and understood, positively psychoactive properties in cocoa. I mean this is very remarkable stuff. So I think we are going to see an era of supplementation in which just like we saw with green tea, where concentrated extracts of green tea have now made their way into supplements and formulas all over the place. I think we will see that with high-flavonol cocoa extracts for all the right reasons.

Catherine: And certainly there are worse things to be addicted to. And here at Natural Standard, we’ve actually looked into some research about what people might think, like “Are cocoa and chocolate going to make me gain weight?” or “Which would increase my blood pressure and all these things.” But there actually is research to support that it can help you lose weight and decrease your blood pressure. I remember we did a big story about it around Valentine’s Day, that chocolate can actually be good for you. And it reminds me of the old stories you hear of the French people who were eating all these pastries and cheese and red wine, and then they end up having healthy body weight and living longer than we do in the U.S., and it’s because of the healthy ingredients like resveratrol (like you mentioned earlier), that actually have beneficial effects in the body. Do you have any other favorite antioxidant botanicals you would like to educate us about?

Chris: Well, I’m a big fan of the super high-end antioxidant foods, really. Some of my favorites are so common place you’ll laugh. I personally believe that if everybody ate one onion a day, (cooked is fine), we would see vastly reduced rates of cardiovascular disease because onions are one of the highest sources of quercetin, which is one of the most miraculous substances on earth. So, I’m a big fan of onions. I’m really a fan of what’s accessible. I think that anybody who appreciates the taste can only benefit from drinking 2 or 3 cups of green tea every single day. I do, and I’m still going to have the same blood lipid profile I had 30 years ago. I believe strongly in eating the dark purple berries because they are loaded with anthocyanin, which are these terrifically powerful plant-derived antioxidants that provide anti-inflammatory activities and have preventive capacities of all different types and are active in the brain in positive ways. So I’m a big fan of those; big fan of using fresh, raw ginger on a regular basis and hot chili preparations of different kinds (whether it’s Tabasco® sauce or something more exotic) because all these different compounds are antioxidants for sure. But in addition, they have other biological benefits. They may lower blood lipids; they may be protective against many forms of cancer. I’m really a believer in the high-antioxidant lifestyle overall and in getting as much diverse protective compounds from as many sources as possible. And certainly cocoa is very high on that list, as is turmeric, that we talked about earlier.

Catherine: I know too the keratin addition to the fruits and vegetables that you mentioned like onions and green teas, it’s also in red wine and brassica vegetables like cabbage and broccoli and cauliflower and turnips, it’s also found in some other plants like Ginkgo biloba and St. John’s Wort and American elder, for example. So there are multiple venues to intake these flavonoids.

Chris: The good news is that we have this tremendous amount of knowledge now about the protective activities of even simple foods. The whole “an apple a day” thing turns out to be pretty accurate, actually. They’re really, really just insanely high in protective antioxidant compounds and pectin and good stuff, and oh wow, they really do, in fact, help to reduce the risk of all kinds of things.

You mentioned the French; I just got back a few days ago from spending time with a major French client of mine. And I go out to dinner with these people, and for the most part, I have to say, they eat like a house on fire, and they are all skinny, and it just makes you laugh because they are not withholding on the salad dressing or the butter on the bread or the cheese or the wine or whatever the meats or anything. But I think there is a freshness to a lot of the ingredients and far, far less-processed foods overall, and certainly the benefits of the wines and fresh produce, I think, acts very much in their favor. I think we have dietary lessons to learn from that.

Catherine: As well as their approach in dealing with stress. Back when you were talking about the adaptogens, you know the impact that stress can have on somebody’s health. So I think to be controlling your stresses, relaxation, physical activities; all of those things are lifestyle things that are equally as important as things that we put in our mouths.

Chris: Oh, no question. It’s actually the lifestyle that’s going to make the greatest difference. You know, if people are following many of the simple principles: not eating overly processed foods, getting their exercise every day, making it count, drinking pure water, breathing fresh air, spending time with friends and family, reducing stress through pleasurable activities. You are going to have a better quality of life, and you are going to be healthier; that’s just the fact of it.

Catherine: Right, and with you hiking all over the world and going out into the jungle and you keeping super-active as well, so you are a good role model for all of us. I was going to ask you if you have any news about any botanical therapies for allergies because I know we are getting tons of inquiries about that with the tree pollens full go now and the grass pollination season coming up. In your travels have you experienced any botanicals that might help prevent or dissipate some of the symptoms from seasonal allergies?

Chris: Oh sure. One of the most widely used of all of the traditional remedies is nettle. Dr. James Duke as you know, not only known as one of the most brilliant plant scientist, but he was also the USDA’s head botanist for 30 years, is a big advocate of drinking nettle tea or using preparations of nettle during seasonal allergy periods. There are compounds in nettles that help to reduce the whole inflammatory, allergic response overall. So you can drink nettle tea in bags or you can get concentrated nettle supplements. The Amazon plant cat’s claw is one of the greatest of all the immune-enhancing aids in the world and supplements of cat’s claw can help to improve immune functions so you don’t have an allergic reaction during the high-pollen season. Right now, certain people are really being hit very hard by pollen and have seasonal allergies, while others around them are not affected at all, and the difference is really immune function, and that is due to a lot of different factors. If people are trying one thing, they’re trying another; they just are not getting relief, some of the symptomatic-relief agents can come through – something like eucalyptus. You can get a eucalyptus nasal inhaler; you get this natural aromatic oil that helps to open up sinuses. I like the Olbas that Swiss company; they make the good eucalyptus inhaler. But also you can take eucalyptus oil capsules. There’s a product called SinuCare that EuroPharma makes, and it’s actually a capsule of essential oils of eucalyptus, and it helps to open up sinuses. So you can find symptomatic relief just as you can in the over-the-counter drug category, but with few uncomfortable effects.

Catherine: And the cat’s claw and eucalyptus are prime examples of what we were discussing earlier about a whole-body approach to health and getting additional benefits aside from helping with your allergic rhinitis or asthma symptoms. These both (eucalyptus and cat’s claw) have been studied and have shown that they might help for pain and arthritis. Another one that just popped into my mind, you were talking about the peppers and cayenne and capsaicin, there’s some evidence that those might help for allergies, as well as pain and other medical conditions.

Chris: If you are (I’ve done this) if you are really congested by allergies, and you eat a soup that is just full of blazing hot chilies, it’ll unquestionably open your head up after. Your sinuses just start pouring like faucets for a time. So yes, we have a variety of remedies. Some of them are very amusing in how they work, as in the case of hot chilies, for sure.

Catherine: And I can share a personal antidote with a patient I saw who tried everything – every drug, every physical therapy, you name it – for osteoarthritis, and after years and years of just being miserable and having a really negative impact on their lifestyle, they tried capsaicin cream topically on their knees, which is made from the seeds of chili peppers, and it’s pharmacological form of action is known that it actually blocks substance P in your body. So as scientists, we have proof of how it may work, and the person, in 6 weeks, was walking around for the first time in over a decade. And it was just miraculous to observe. All the insurance dollars wasted on doctors’ offices and all of these things. Could you image if he had just whipped up a cream from some chili peppers he grew in his back yard? This all could have been prevented. So, it’s very enlightening to know we have these options available to us and that there are people out there in the world like you, who really help to surface them and bring them to our attention so that we can enjoy their benefits. And I really encourage the scientific approach that you’ve taken and investigating, and observing people who are taking them for long periods of time so that you feel confident recommending them and assuring their safety. You are really doing a service to the community.

Chris: Well thank you for that. I think we’re very fortunate to live in the time that the traditional uses of many of the plant out there that are common traditional medicines, that the uses have been explored and corroborated by modern scientific means. This gives people great confidence. Obviously, if a plant is used for a certain purpose by millions of people all over the world for thousands of years, it works for that purpose. But the question often is: “how does it do that?” We have the ability now to find these things out, and so this helps to advance the real science part of plant-medicine, while still enabling us to take advantage of the wholesome, multi-component nature of these plant-derived medicines that are widely used and very, very beneficial for health.

Catherine: Terrific. And being able to explain it in a way to say for the very conventionally minded scientist “I want to see some statistics, or I want to see some chemistry to support this,” and then backing that up with traditional use and a strong precedent of health benefits and safety from hundreds or thousands of years, I think maybe really helps to establish consensus statements that will help to encourage open dialog between different types of healthcare providers. So physicians and osteopaths and chiropractors and herbalists and pharmacists, everybody can work together to really give their patients the best care. And consumers can rely on this information and feel confident in discussing these different therapies and lifestyle choices with their providers as well. So I think it’s coming around full circle, and we are really lucky to be a part of this research explosion, so to speak, on the scientific side and out there on the field, bringing it into the public domain, like you’re doing. So we are very thankful for all that you do, Chris and hope to cross paths in the future. I did make one note while I was listening to you earlier, you mentioned an organization call EuroPharma and actually in a couple of weeks, we are going to be interviewing the president of EuroPharma, Terry Lemerond who has a new weekly radio program out called Health Radio. I bet you are going to be, or I hope that you’ll be, interviewed on that program as well so we can really gain from your wealth of knowledge.

Chris: Well, you know, Terry does a terrific job, and I’m sure I will wind up doing some of that too. He’s one of the greats in the industry, and it’s a pleasure to see EuroPharma doing well, and I think there’s a lot of opportunity for companies who are putting out effective products, and he is certainly doing that. I imagine he will continue to spread the gospel, if you will, in a lot of clever, creative, and highly impactful ways.

Catherine: Terrific. Well thanks again.

Natural Standard: The Authority on Integrative Medicine. www.naturalstandard.com


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  • June 2011