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A Potion in the Press
This article says a lot... Initial writings of Kenneth Jones, author of Pau d'Arco, Immune Power of the Rain Forest. While researching for information about Pau d'Arco effects for diabetics I found that these opening paragraphs from the authors authoritative book to be quite informative. A little lengthy but contains a wealth of information well worth reading.
The spring of 1967 found the masses of Brazil reeling from the commotion caused by press reports of a powerful tea made from the bark of the pau d'arco tree. As hundreds offered testimony before the cameras of Sao Paulo TV, people began ripping the bark from the trees wherever they could be found. A devestation of Pau d'arco was seen across the country. What with the following announcement in the press, it isn't difficult to see why.
"The story of the discovery is fantastic. But it is nothing compared the news which could be the most important in the history of humanity. Cancer has a cure... the news--cure for cancer--is to be taken as being essentially true and honest, or more exactly, strictly scientific." Strictly speaking, of course the news was not "scientific" and contrary what the story would have the people believe, cancer did not at last have a cure. However, key individuals interviewed in that and subsequent reports in the Brazilian news magazine O'Cruzeiro have since confirmed that the contents are accurate and represent the only extensive account of pau d'arco's contemporary history in Brazil.
Having traced a seemingly endless number of people who would testify to near-miraculous "cures", O'Cruzeiro began with the account of a girl in Rio, sick with cancer, incessantly praying for a cure. In a vision, a monk promised her recovery if she would drink tea brewed from the bark of the pau d'Arco tree. But to her parents this was plainly a symptom of her weakened condition and loss of faith in her physicians. In a second visitation, the monk said that she would be cured if she drank tea made from the pau d'arco trees growing in Pernambuco or Bahia and then told the news to others. However supernatural, the advice was heeded, and she regained her health. O'Cruzeiro learned from this one case, numerous others had faithfully followed. The trail of cures led to a famous Brazilian herbalist.
THE SKEPTICAL PROFESSOR
Traveling to Piracicaba, the magazine reporters visited the one person who more than any other in Brazil had championed the bark, the botanist Valter Acorsi, professor emeritus at the University of Sao Paulo. They found him attending lines of over 2000 people a day. The demand was so great that he worked from dawn to dusk distibuting the bark for free. Accorsi began his career in the 1930s and has since accumulated a vast inventory of herbal therapies. He is widely regarded as one of Brazil's most prominent patrons of herbs and is frequently consulted by industry, physicians, and just plain folks, all in search of the knowledge his lifetime with plants provides.
He knew well the episode of the girl in Rio and when close friends started using the bark, he began to study the trees in his own state of Sao Paulo to see whether they might serve just as well as those from Bahi, located in the northeast of Brazil. He admitted that his work could hardly be called scientific, he relied only upon simple observations. The trees from Sao Paulo in the south had the same qualities, but the northern population from Pernambuco and Bahia seemed best. Taking 400 kilograms from purple- and yellow-flowered pau d'arco, both from Bahia, he compared the effects in leukemia patients. He was convinced that the bark of the purple-flowered pau d'arco was superior.
Accorsi believed he was able to verify "two great truths":The bark eliminated pain and caused a significant increase in the volume of red blood cells. He noted how the bark appeared to be curing everything from diabetes to ulcers and rheumatism, and it it seemed to be working in a matter of weeks. Even so, he was reluctant to believe it and for a time kept the information largely to himself.
When the wife of a childhood friend recovered from terminal cancer of the intestine, his inate skepticism finally gave way. Over a period of eight months she had endured five operations. Accorsi explained that after taking the bark she was well again. O'Cruzeiro verified the account.
From early in the morning, Accorci's telephone kept ringing with orders for the bark, mostly from doctors. For the treatment of cancer, he suggested an extract of the bark, a teaspoon with water at intervals of three hours. Dosages were not exact because as he explained, the "composition" and levels of active constituents had not been worked out. A dosage limit was regulated with a maximum indicated by the appearance of "a slight rash."
CLINICAL INQUIRY
An interview with Accorsi's sister, Gioconda provided leads to more recent cases, and the reporters were suddenly faced with an incredible variety from which to chose. A handful of their verified cases are recounted in the following paragraphs.
A nun with cancer of the tongue finally gave up on conventionable treatments when lengthy radiation therapy offered negligible relief and she could no longer talk. Her health restored, she telephoned every week to order the bark for others.
Doctors attending a certain Francisco de Arrunda became desperate when they learned their patient has abandoned them to find relief from "Arigo," the famous trance-surgeon who operated with little more than an ordinary pocket-knife. "Francisco was found, and the tumor on his scalp was treated with the bark in a topical form. Six years later, when he was ninety-two years old, no sign of the cancer remained.
An oncologist and surgeon, Dr. Jose Iemini related the case of an older man he had peviously operated on who should have been dead a year earlier: the cancer was spreading through the stomach and liver. His patient made such a recovery that he was able to visit the clinic by traveling on foot from outside the city.
Dr. Neves was another who was familiar with the bark, but he limited its use mostly to patients with rheumatism. He claimed that the results were extraordinary." As for cancer, all four of the cases that he treated with pau d'Arco were hopeless. "The patients were as old as the cancer."
After seven years of firsthand observation, Accorsi concluded that the bark held six main areas of application: diuretic, sedative, analgesic, decongestant, antibiotic, and cardiotonic.
MEDIA CONFRONTATION
In their follow-up one week later, the O'Cruzeiro the reporters began dolefuly describing the consequences of their first report. Many of the accounts have been supplied by physicians who were now at great risk of losing their licenses by prescribing the bark in hospitals. Another problem was the multitude gathered on the lawns of the hospital at Santo Andre hoping to obtain the new precious bark. The crowd grew to such a size that the normal function of the hospital was seriously threatened. Here, and at the Hospital of Clinics in Sao Paulo, signs hung in the hallways announcing the distribution of the bark was suspended. But the public would not be detered. At the Botanical Gardens in Campinas, then a city of 500,000, and at other reserves across Brazil, droves of people clambered walls and fences to strip the bark from the trees conveniently marked as the "purple" pau d'arco by the botanist who tended and now patroled them. Pau d'arco had become a phenomenon.
The reporters confessed that their emphsis on a "cure" for cancer was deliberate, "in order to make [pau d'arco] stand out. they promised to reveal doctor's names, medical histories, x-ray and biopsy test results, and any other documented evidence. But throughout the hospital of Santo Andre the subject was closed: experiments were stopped, and the entire staff was forbidden to discuss the matter.
Now it was war. Publishing names, incriminating quotations, and, bearing the heading of the hospital, signed prescriptions for the bark in the treatment of cancer and diabetes, O'Cruzeiro broke all pacts of silence. The hospital pharmacist, Benedito de Castro, confirmed the studies at the hospital where the bark had always been used and accompanied by a medical prescription, but de Castro made it known that the hospital was not proclaiming that cancer at last had a cure. His intention was to place a complete dossier in the hands of an authority who after serious investigation would then be able to discuss the subject.
Not everyone was so cautious. Pharmacist Antonio Braga motioned that the bark be acquired for mass distibution to the public. He also felt that the government should take over, and in fact some such efforts were already being made. The Ministry of Agriculture sent samples to the United States and the federal parliament assigned a commission of inquiry "to clarify what there is to be known."
A meeting was arranged for reporters to put forth further questions at the mayor's office. As the chambers heated with testimony about "cures" the reporters learned that the recorded cases of diabetics cured with pau d'Arco had gone past the 1,000 mark. Pharmacist Octaviano Gaiarsa recalled cured cases of varicose ulcers, one of anemia, and of skin cancer resistant to all conventional treatments, and one case in which tests had confirmed the remission of osteomyelitis (inflation of the bone caused by a pus-forming organism). He related the story of "an advanced case of leukemia" that the hospital had assesed as fatal. The white blood cell was up to 240,000. A month of pau d'arco later, the count was a normal 20,000. Dr. Gaiarsa referred the reporters to the pharmacist de Castro, descibing him as very knowledgeable on the subject and one who had compiled a dossier of cases that numbered in the thousands. When de Castro was interviewed he expressed his confidence in the bark, especially against diabetes. (Brazilian scientists have since discovered that like several other Brazilian herbs commonly used to treat diabetes, pau d'arco (Tabebuia heptaphyllia) inhibits the absortion of glucose in the intestine.
TAKING CONFESSIONS
Another magazine story appeared in June of 1967. The reporters quoted at length from a document jointly prepared by a number of Sao Paulo physicians. They came forth because they could no longer hold back their "observations and ask why the medication improves juvenile diabetes in such an impressive manner, reducing the glucose level to the normal amount." (Juvenile diabetes is a severe form of diabetes mellitus that very rarely responds to diet or oral hypoglycemics.) They also wondered, "Why did a cardiac patient at level IV, uncompensated , raised urea, dyspnea, with constant oxygen... have complete disappearance of the adema, reduction of urea, and abandon of his oxygen bottle at the head of the bed, and return to his activities?" The Sao Paulo physicians reported that for those suffering incurable disease conditions, pau d'arco "appears to reastablish in them an organic equilibrium, improving even the hematological count."
The news magazine obtained further case histories from a former government health minister, Dr. Sebastien Laet. Despite his admitted perplexity over the bark, he too could not remain silent. Dr. Laet recounted persistant varicose ulcers--over twenty years old--healed in sixteen weeks with an ointment of the bark. Already treated with chemotherapy, a patient suffering terminal breast cancer was not expected to live more than another month. But following the bark treatment for seven months, a biopsy revealed the cancer was gone. A man of eighty-one, semicomatose, urinating profusely. vomiting,and in extreme pain from the cancer in his rectum, should have died. The nurse who attended him recalled the patient they expected would perish but who was now well.
The Sao Paulo doctors revealed further symptoms of ulcers; more remissions from cancer (of the tongue, throat, breast, stomach, and prostate); another cardiovascular disorder; a case of cronic hypertension; and a formaly diabetic physician who claimed to have "cured himself" with the bark. But for the public, confusion soon replaced optimism, the news was just too fantastic. While physicians and patients added corroborating testimony, the Sao Paulo Hospital of Clinics released a press announcement deriding pau d'arco, saying that the bark provided "no benefit at all for the treatment of cancer." then from one newspaper to the next, the public did not know what to believe. One paper cried, "Cures Cancer." Another paper said that the bark "Cures Everything." while in the opposite stream one paper held that pau d'arco "Doesn't Cure Cancer." That paper settled the issue through a simple deduction: pau d'arco was just the annual cure-all foisted upon an unfortunate and all too eager public by the unscrupulous. Meanwhile, hucksters began passing off as the real pau d'arco barks from at least two other kinds of trees (jaqueira and aroeira trees).
The science community had scarcely begun to voice interest. In Sao Paulo, an independent group of physicians found rats subjected to experimental cancer survived much longer with pau d'arco. And a note on the bark in Pulso, a journal from the Winthrop Laboratories in Brazil, reported that a professor Italo Boquino and colleagues had found activity against diabetes and gastritis. There was something to the folk remedy, after all. But how much was anyone's guess.
From the day O'Cruzeiro's first story first appeared on the newsstands in Brazil, pau d'arco was never again prescribed at the Hospital of Santo Anre, at least not so openly. The bark was not approved as a drug for any condition, and so legally its prescription was out of the question. More than twenty years later, questions about how pau d'arco works continue to be raised, and I expect that to continue for years to come. On two occasions since 1967, a new clinical director at the hospital, Dr. Fadlo Fraige Filho, had made concerted efforts to conduct a full "scientific study" of patients on the bark. Once in 1975 and again in 1979, he tried to encourage the cooperation of his fellow physicians. But each time the voting majority of doctors at the hospital declined: they would have nothing to do with such a scheme for fear of being labeled quacks.
ELIXER FOR THE ARGENTINES
Pau d'Arco next became front page news in Argentina's northwest in October, 1967. An article in the newspaper Ultima Linea revealed that in the city of San Miguel de Tucuman, located in the foothills of the Andes, a tea, salve, amd extract of a bark from the local timbers was being applied in the treatments of asthma, cancer, eczema, leukemia, and rhumatism. Early records held that it "acted like a tonic" and wakened the appetite. Yet doctors were seeing changes they couldn't explain.
The bark would also have a mentor in Argentina. A colleage of Professor Accorsi, Ted Meyer (1911-72) served as a professor of botany and plant geography at the Miguel Lillo Institute and Herbarium in San Miguel de Tucuman. From there he was a principal supplier of herbs to pharmaceutical companies in search of new agents to combat disease. For example, he provided the drug giant Merk and Co. of New Jersey with herbs used in folk medicine to treat fevers and malaria. According to his son, medicinal plants had been his father's greatest love ever since he was a young man, He spoke Spanish and German, but more important, he had learned the tongue of the local indians and so had access to their knowledge of medicinal plants. He was also a distinguished botanist. In 1965 he received Argentina's first National Prize in Biology for his contributions to the field.
This was the beginning of the modern day history of Pau d'Arco Tea...
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