We had two Thanksgiving dinners. Wednesday night we drove out to one nephew's house to see their new baby daughter. Another nephew arranged for an incredible Italian dinner to be catered at the house. We ate on paper plates, watched basketball on TV, and admired the baby. She is just two weeks old. I am a great-aunt again! What a thrill to hold her and have her fall asleep in my arms.

When I think Italian, I think pasta, and certainly there was plenty of that. But there were other choices as well. Salad with beneficial greens was plentiful. Plus there was steamed broccoli and chicken roasted with Italian herbs. My one avoid for the evening was a zucchini dish that I didn't realize contained wheat until I tasted it. It was too delicious, and therefore too late to stop.

Today's traditional turkey feast was sadly small in numbers. My husband's father passed away last spring and was sorely missed. Two family members had the flu and went back to bed after putting in brief appearances. Another nephew had to work.

The turkey was delicious, and neutral for all. I had two bites of cornbread dressing in honor of the day. Other than that I filled my plate with vegetables and fruits.

Come, ye thankful people come.

Raise the song of harvest home.

All is safely gathered in,

Ere the winter storms begin.

God, our maker, doth provide

For our wants to be supplied.

Come to God's on temple come.

Raise the song of harvest home.

Spent yesterday's austere training session working on something called a 'jump spin back kick,' a strange gyration that involves spinning in the air as you jump, ultimately kicking into a direction that you cannot actually see.

Interesting how easy something like this appears to a twelve year old, versus, say, a forty-eight year old. A kid just jumps, much like a cat, knowing that he is springy enough to get up and around, and flexible enough to not be troubled by the thought of a posterior landing. By the time you get to my age, you start to ponder the osseous consequences of this sort an action, which is why you hesitate and fail.

Napoleon once said that it was amazing what you could get an eighteen year old to do for a piece of ribbon.

The immortality thing.

The forty-eight year old is more likely to say 'Uh, no thanks. I have enough ribbon right now.'

Last night my sister in law Rita, an nurse with an extensive background in research, sent me an abstract from the Journal of Clinical Oncology, titled 'Herbal Remedies in the United States: Potential Adverse Interactions With Anticancer Agents' (J Clin Oncol 2004;22 2489-2503). The crux of the article being the potential threat to chemotherapy drug effectiveness posed by such botanicals as garlic and echinacea, which may influence the body's ability to metabolize chemotherapy drugs, and compromise their effectiveness. She asked me what I thought about the article.

When I finally got a full version, two things stuck out immediately. One, this was a review article, meaning that there was no proof of any such activity being presented, but rather a tenuous connection between the known, but rather modest, effects of certain herbs on the cytochrome p450 system (drug detoxification) and the p-glycoprotein levels (drug delivery).

More accurately an editorial, it provided absolutely no evidence to back up any of its assertions. C'mon guys, talking about garlic interfering with p-glycoprotein and blocking a drug like taxol is like saying that a paper bag containing your lunch has the 'hidden potential' to derail an Amtrak train. Hey, if garlic or herbal antioxidants and p-450 modulators were all that effective at blocking cell damage (chemically programmed or not), there wouldn't be any need for oncologists and oncology journals in the first place.

Amazingly, the article then goes on to advise physicians to look into herbal use in non-responding cancer patients as a rationale for treatment failure, a rather cruel balm to the fact that greater than 99% of those non-responders are simply not going to be cured by chemotherapy, herbal medicine or no herbal medicine.

An article published in the Archives of Internal Medicine (Archive Int Med; 1998;20: 2187-2191) may help explain why medical academics spend their time worrying about garlic blocking chemotherapy. It looked at conventional attitudes toward supplementation. Their conclusions: Throughout 20th century American academic medicine has resisted the concept that supplementation with micronutrients might have health benefits.

According to the authors, this resistance is evident in several ways:

(1) by the uncritical acceptance of news of toxicity, such as the belief that vitamin C supplements cause kidney stones;

(2) by the angry, scornful tone used in discussions of micronutrient supplementation in the leading textbooks of medicine; and

(3) by ignoring evidence for possible efficacy of a micronutrient supplement, such as the use of vitamin E for intermittent claudication.

Part of the resistance stems from the fact that the potential benefits of micronutrients were advanced by outsiders, who took their message directly to the public, and part from the fact that the concept of a deficiency disease did not fit in well with prevailing biomedical paradigms, particularly the germ theory. Similar factors might be expected to color the response of academic medicine to any alternative treatment.

I boldfaced the line about 'outsiders' as I can relate to that one personally, since I am a naturopathic physician (strike one!) posit a diet theory that does not fit in well with the prevailing paradigm (strike two!) and wrote a book on the subject for the public (yer out!)

Instead of wasting time looking for herbal inactivators of chemotherapy these folks should look at ABO polymorphism to help explain cancer treatment variation. Type A individuals may have as much as seven fold higher levels of p-glycoprotein, 30% higher levels of von Willebrand Factor and significantly higher levels of e-selectin and ICAM --all know modifiers of metastasis, drug delivery or resistance.

There is a certain lack of candor in a medical community that rebukes supplements as weak and ineffective medicines, yet warns that these same supplements are dangerously blocking chemotherapy drugs.

Reminds me of the joke about the two oldtimers at the early bird special:

The first one turns to the other and says 'The food here is terrible.'

The second oldtimer turns to the first and says 'Yeah, and the portions are small, too.'