This afternoon, I read a Medscape item on Phase I trials of medicinal mushrooms and Chinese herbs as treatments for COVID. The mushrooms in question are not hallucinogenic but rather fungi that can stimulate cell-mediated immunity. One trial examines the mushrooms as COVID vaccine adjuvants. The mushrooms in question are the Turkey Tail and Agarikon varieties. Both are available OTC as nutritional supplements.
The article reminded me of the 1992 movie Medicine Man starring Sean Connery as an ethnobotanist working in the Amazon jungle trying to isolate an anticancer drug from a rare orchid. My Mom loved this movie – in part because she always thought that Connery was an excellent actor and a handsome devil, and in part because she was a pharmacist knowledgeable in medicinal botany. Over the years, we chatted about the subject.
In the two years before I enrolled in medical school, I took life science prerequisites that I had neglected in my college education. I put a heavy emphasis on botany and on organic and bio- chemistry. My Plan B, should I not gain admission into a medical school, was to get a PhD in botany and become an ethnobotanist; this was almost 20 years before the movie. As it turned out, I wound up a physician rather than an ethnobotanist.
Before we dismiss this kind of research, we should recognize that Quinine comes from a tree bark; Penicillin comes from a fungus; the anti-cancer drugs Vincristine and Vinblastine come from the lovely Periwinkle plant; muscarine comes from the mushroom Amanita muscaria, and more recently, Artemisinin was isolated from the Artemisia annua. Artemisinin, a cure for Malaria, earned Tu Youyou a Nobel Prize. Plants are amazing chemical factories.
Will these early clinical trials of mushrooms and Chinese herbs enhance the effectiveness of COVID vaccines or successfully treat mild-to-moderate COVID? We shall see. I am rooting for the mushrooms. And, if they do not pan out (most medicinal compounds do not), perhaps we can have them in a bleu cheese cream sauce over our favorite protein.
No, I am not going to spoil the movie Medicine Man; suffice it to say that it was a wonderful story with just the right kind of ending.