Spice Medicine and Oxygen
Part I

Spices have comprised the major part of the indigenous pharmacopeia — "spice medicine" seems to be a suitable name for it — throughout history in all parts of the world. Among practitioners of that art, the ancient Indians and Chinese were the most advanced. The hill that separated India and China never fully prevented discourse among the peoples of those lands. Indeed, the most highly recommended and most commonly prescribed spices (as well as plant-based remedies) in Ayurvedic medicine and traditional Chinese medicine are the same. Furthermore, Greco-Roman medicine was essentially based on the two older systems of India and China.

The Arab pharmacopeia during the age of the Arab glory was essentially "Indian-Chinese-Greek" medicine integrated with other plant-derived phytofactors. Thus, Arab medicine during the ninth through twelfth centuries A.D. was spice medicine as well. Interestingly, spices (along with silk) are what lured the Europeans to India. Vasco da Gama (1460-1524), a Portuguese explorer, discovered an ocean route from Portugal to the East. He rounded Africa's Cape of Good Hope on November 22,1497 and reached Calicut (modern Calcutta), India on May 20, 1498. (He fought with Arab traders as well the Indians, using extreme torture, when he could, to establish his superiority over the natives. Vasco da Gama and his patron, King Manuel I of Portugal, were as interested in the spices of the East as they were in the silk. Accordingly, the journey of Christopher Columbus to the Americas, of course, was simply another trip made to satiate the European feeding frenzy on spices and silk — with an eye for future colonization. (I wonder how the celebrated French cuisine might taste today had it not been for those fabled spices from the East. Most likely it would be what English cuisine is today.) I present these subjects at length in my book The History and Philosophy of Integrative Medicine, the second volume The Principles and Practice of Integrative Medicine.

Then the dark century of medicine arrived when the chemical drug industry used unenlightened disease doctors of drug medicine as their tools for suppression of natural therapies. Those control-crazed pseudoscietists of medicine dismissed all empirically-validated remedies as unscientific. There is a sharp contrast between synthetic blockade medicine — drugs that block cell membrane receptors, channels, pumps, and molecules of healing responses — and phytofactors and nutrients that facilitate healing responses in integrative ways. Blocker drugs work fast but cause long-term problems of the blockade of essential cellular functions. Natural remedies, by contrast, work slowly but restore crucial cellular functions. Why don't the pseudoscientists in medicine understand something that simple? Perhaps because they are not paid by their paymasters at drug companies to think. Fortunately there is a change taking place. The community of physicians is beginning to see through the phony expertise of those pseudoscientists of medicine, and is recognizing the anti- inflammatory, bowel-restorative, blood-cleansing, and liver-detoxifying characteristics of many spices. There is an explosion of studies that are delineating the biologic benefits of the various components of spices with advanced analytic technology, as I show in other articles of this series.

Why bring oxygen into discussions about the medicinal benefits of on spices? Succinctly stated, what prevents unregulated inflammation restores oxygen homeostasis which, in my opinion, is the final goal in all healing work. In that sense, all spices with anti-inflammatory benefits contribute to the correction of the oxygen disorder (the dysox state) and the restoration of oxygen homeostasis. However, there is another crucial issue here: I do not consider spice therapies to be complete treatment for any of the so-called inflammatory disorders — colitis, arthritis, vasculitis, thyroiditis, asthma, nephritis, eczema, and others. At the bioenergetic cellular level, all inflammatory, autoimmune, and neurodegenerative disorders are caused by the oxygen disorder (dysfunctional oxygen utilization) caused by cellular toxicity in the cells. In that light, I consider it a serious clinical error not to add relevant direct and indirect oxygen therapies to spice therapies as components of all integrative treatment plans. For extended discussions of those and other related subjects, I refer advanced and professional readers to Integrative Nutritional Medicine and Dysoxygenosis and Oxystatic Therapies, the fifth and third volumes respectively of The Principles and Practice of Integrative Medicine.

A friend recently insisted that turmeric is an excellent anti-inflammatory but garlic is not. He also asserted that garlic is an effective antiviral food while turmeric is not. I wondered what might be the basis of those statements. In my clinical work among patients with the common cold, I find that turmeric — one- half teaspoon taken with organic vegetable juice or grapefruit juice three times a day — is far more effective than garlic. Putting that aside, my friend's assertions raise a deeper question: Can the antiviral and anti-inflammatory effects of spices ever be seperated with confidence? What is antiviral, by definition, is anti-inflammatory. What is anti-inflammatory is also antiviral when seen through the prism of oxygen homeostasis. Stated another way, every pre-existing non-physiological inflammatory process increases the pathogenicity of viruses, and every existing viral infection feeds the pathologic inflammatory response. (See the article entitled "The Dysox Model of Inflammation" on www.majidali.com and Integrative Immunology, the fourth volume of The Principles and Practice of Integrative Medicine for further discussion of this subject.)

All spices (and herbs) with empirically known benefits for digestive- absorptive disorders also have anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial effects. That is easy to understand since pathological (but not physiologic) inflammation and infectious processes feed upon each other. Again, the issue of dysfunctional oxygen metabolism (the dysox state) is equally important in the treatment of both types of clinical problems.

Principles of Spice Medicine

In closing this first of my series of article on the spice medicine and oxygen, I briefly state the following important aspects of such therapies that may be considered the principles of spice medicine:

1. Mono-spice therapy in large doses but for short periods of time can be very effective for acute conditions. To cite one example, large doses of ginger are often helpful in controlling motion sickness and pregnancy- related nausea. However, continuous mono-spice therapy for extended periods of time should be avoided.
2. Poly-spice therapy — the concurrent use of spices with empirically- recognized complementary roles — is generally more beneficial for controlling acute infectious and inflammatory processes. For instance, turmeric, ginger, garlic, and cayenne (when tolerated well) can be combined for better results.
3. For chronic inflammatory and infectious disorders, mono-spice therapy should be avoided. Poly-spice therapy for such disorders yields superior results when combined with direct oxystatic therapies, such as hygrogen peroxide foot soaks (done with one part 3% peroxide and 30 parts of water with a pich of salt added).

The discussions of the therapeutic benefits of specific spices are presented in other articles of this series.