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Aspirin notes

I. Introduction to medical drugs vs. nutritional products: In the introduction to The Second International Conference on Antioxidant Vitamins and b-Carotene in Disease Prevention, there is a review of a recent symposium including 34 papers. The review highlights the ability of vitamins C and E and aspirin to reduce the risk of age-associated disease. The papers also support the questionable value and possible hazards of b-carotene and multivitamins.

Sies, H., and Krinsky, J.I., "The Present Status of Antioxidant Vitamins and b-carotene", Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 62(suppl): 1299S-1300S (1995)

My father used to say, "All generalizations are false - and so is this one!". As I read books on natural healing, herbal remedies, and alternative medical practices, I see many promises for easy answers. Are we all so foolish that we believe every person who claims to be an expert? Must every author in the popular nutrition field be a zealot, who claims to have the obvious truth, when no one else does? On the one hand, there is no question that herbs as remedies have some value. About one-quarter of modern medicines like aspirin were derived from natural sources. But one should be conscious of the biochemical actions of what is consumed. Minerals and vitamins are primarily necessary for enzymes to effectively catalyze metabolic reactions. Many other pure compounds act in complicated signalling wasy. And most herbal and "natural" substances are mixtures of many chemicals in varying amounts that may have numerous effects, some of which can be hazardous, and for sensitive individuals even fatal, as was the case with the herbal supplement ephedra, used for energy and weight loss until the FDA banned it in 2003.

A number of important points should be made. First, thalidomide was approved for use in Europe, but not the United States. Today, herbal remedies are widely used in Europe and Japan, but are just entering the U.S. marketplace. The main source of information about the safety and efficacy of herbs is the German Commission E, which is the regulatory agency for herbs in Germany, and produces monographs about such products. It is ironic that the safety and efficacy of herbs claimed by most products and authors are based on these studies which follow the weaker European regulatory standards that approved thalidomide. But although thalidomide was not approved in the United States, I admit that our standards too are not foolproof by any means. Do you know that if developed today, thalidomide would still probably pass the requirements to be approved as a drug in the United States? No set of tests is perfect enough to find every danger. On the other hand, aspirin and the antibiotic streptomycin would not be approved as drugs if they were developed today, because the dangers and side effects would appear too great to permit their use.

II. Take aspirin (regular 3x/week or baby aspirin daily)

III. How much aspirin should one take?