 So how are you guys doing? Are you guys enjoying the conference? No, so I love botanical medicine. I've done a lot of research with botanicals. And this is going to be a little controversial. But let's get it rolling. We're going to go through a brief history of how botanical medicine can help you fight infections. We're going to talk about how we can take advantage of plants, but how we can abuse these plants, even though they are natural. And then we're going to kind of discuss like the future and some of the things that we can do with botanical medicine. So the significance of penicillin. Without penicillin, you probably wouldn't be here. Bacterial infections were awful. They were catastrophic. If you had a bacterial infection, you more than likely had a really good chance of dying. And we have grown up in an environment that this is no longer a problem. So because of penicillin, we have decrease death from infection. We have improved outcomes from surgery. And all of this happened from this dude Fleming. And it was an accident. Some mold grew in a petri dish. And all of a sudden, he saw that there was a clearing from bacteria around where that mold grew. And so we all know this story, but sometimes we forget about how difficult or how slowly science moves. And it wasn't just a one-person effort that had a mistake and ended up creating this revolutionary technology. It was the work of people like Chain and Flory. Chain developed the technology that allowed us to isolate and stabilize and produce penicillin. And without those names, we wouldn't be here. And the theme at this conference, every time we talk about mankind, we should also talk about womankind. And without the work of the penicillin girls, people like Flory who directed the clinical trials to prove that penicillin was effective. People like Jennings who helped to discover how toxic penicillin was, and Hodgkins who discovered the actual structure of penicillin. Without these people, we wouldn't be here. Imagine you get an infection. You get maybe a sore throat or something along those lines. And all of a sudden, you have a 33% chance of dying. After the advent of penicillin, now we have a 4% chance of dying. So this little molecule changed the history of the world. The problem is that this little molecule worked too well. And we started abusing it. And now we're faced with this incremental growth in the development of resistant bacteria to antibiotics. And everyone in this room has heard the arguments about how we shouldn't be using antibiotics to treat things like viral infections or anything in that matter. From the 1980s to 2010, the production of new antibiotics to fight this resistant bacteria has decreased. In 2010, only around the number of new antibiotics continues to decrease. The last new antibiotic that was created or discovered is an antibiotic called Theobaxon. And that was in 2014, if I remember correctly. And the resistant bacteria is not stopping. It continues to increase. Now we have heard about things like heart disease or diabetes. We've heard about cancer. By 2050, the number one reason for people dying is going to be bacterial resistance. So this is a very important topic. Are we going to go back to that 33%? So I don't want to be old doom and gloom. And I do want to talk a little bit about the different mechanisms of action of the different antibiotics. Very well understood. Some antibiotics destroy the cell membrane or the cell wall of the bacteria. Others directly affect the DNA. Others kind of destroy proteins. And all of these things are very well understood. And what we don't understand is how the botanicals work. Now we know through traditional medicine and traditional knowledge that they do work. And what my lab wanted to do is we wanted to prove beyond tradition that these things were actually working. So we need to compare them to something that is already established. So let's compare botanicals to things like vancomycin. So you can see in the Stapococcus aureus model, this graph shows that as you increase the dose of vanco, you decrease the number of colonies that are being formed. So that means it works. You use a little bit, not a lot of dye. You use a lot, all of them die. So we needed to find things that worked like vanco. So things like botanicals also had a dose-response curve. So this is no treatment. Bacteria grows on its own. You add a little bit of treatment, and you see a decrease in the bacteria, and then it picks back up. You add more, and then you add more. And the more you add, then the botanical actually destroys the bacteria. That's awesome. So guess what I've got? Botanicals do work. So if you compare them to vancomycin, they're pretty equal. We tested a bunch of different botanicals. And it turns out that some botanicals don't work. And if you know a little bit about botanical medicine, you might notice that things like chisandra, and echinacea, they're used for autoimmune regulation. They're called the adaptogens. So guess what? Yeah, we expected these guys not to work. But we did find a ton of botanicals that have antibacterial activity. In fact, we published this research. And you can find it on PubMed. You can email me. I can give you the paper. And we completely, it's peer reviewed. Botanicals do have some activity against bacteria. But what happens when you have a botanical and you get like a sinus infection and you go to the doctor and the doctor kind of thinks that it's viral, but they give you the antibiotic, viral infection, it's over in like five days. So you only take it for two days. You start feeling better. And now you're exposing bacteria to sub-clinical, sub-lethal doses of this antibiotic. And then something really weird happens, evolution. And bacteria become resistant to this antibiotics. And you know, we know the story. Now, what happens if we take botanicals and we add sub-lethal doses of botanicals to that bacteria, would they create resistance? So we know of four different botanicals that were super effective and we wanted to test this hypothesis. So we started treating these botanicals with low doses of tinctures. So day one, you expose it to a sub-lethal dose. And you know, most of the bacteria regresses and dies. By day 15, we saw a 7.5-fold increase in resistance to that botanical. Now, this is quite interesting because how many people do you guys know that walk around with a bottle of water and they put a little bit of botanical tincture throughout the day and are drinking your, you know, rosemary water, what are we doing to our biome? Now, we do have four different botanicals that we were able to predictively increase the resistant, that bacteria we would be, we were able to create bacteria that were resistant to them. And this is not really bad news because we can always take lemons and make lemonade. So we ran a series of experiments with diffusion discs. Now, when you have a diffusion disc, this diffusion disc is saturated with antibiotic. And when you put it in the media with the bacteria, that zone that is where the bacteria didn't grow, the bacteria couldn't resist the antibiotic and couldn't go closer towards that center. You can see different antibiotics have different zones of inhibition. When we, this is the original bacterium, after we exposed it to the botanical, you can see how the zones of inhibition re-correst. Okay, what we did is we took antibiotics with known mechanisms of action and we exposed them to the resistant bacteria. Now, follow me. This bacteria were made resistant to botanicals. When you create that resistant to botanicals, you also create resistance to actual antibiotics. And now we know how those botanicals work. So that was quite exciting because this is bacteria that was resistant to botanicals and now they were resistant to things like Cipro and penicillin. You can see the zone of inhibition, the resistant bacteria had a smaller zone of inhibition. And you can get the paper where we publish all of our results at the Journal of Evolution and Health. And that's the journal that runs this conference. And if you want this paper is completely free. If you don't want to bother Googling, send me an email, I'll send it to you. So this diffusion disc assay gave us pretty cool information because some botanicals were resistant to one type of antibiotics. As you can see right here, this particular resistant bacteria that was created using a certain botanical was only resistant to penicillin, but not Cipro. So they were so specific. They weren't creating these very fancy ways of eliminating this antibiotic resistance. So botanical A and botanical B created resistance, but not always to multiple mechanisms of action. So we decided, you know, the hypothesis was, well, this extract must be creating some sort of beta-lactam-like structure. And we decided to test this. Now, beta-lactam's sort of funny because that's what Fleming found in penicillin. And before Fleming, nature was already making it some beta-lactams. So you have extract A, you know, extract A you put non-resistant bacteria, you put a little bit of botanical, you see how it's not very, it's very effective. But then you put something called beta-lactamase. And anything that ends with A is an enzyme that degrades something. So this enzyme degrades the beta-lactam. And you can see the more beta-lactamase that we added, the more we were able to kill the bacteria. Or sorry, the more the bacteria was able to survive this botanical. What about the opposite? You know, because what this bacteria, the way they develop resistance, the way they evolve is by creating this little enzyme. So we basically taught the bacteria how to create this beta-lactamase. So what if we take this resistant bacteria and then we add the botanical plus something that fights beta-lactamase, this enzyme. So clavulonic acid is this type of enzyme that destroys the beta-lactamase. It's a competitor. And if you ever heard of the antibiotic augmentin, augmentin is basically penicillin plus clavulonic acid. So we put the botanical plus clavulonic acid and guess what? Resistance went away. So this was really good information saying, you know, this thing is behaving like a beta-lactam. So what if we put all of this botanical into an ELISA and try to see how specific this structure is? Is it really a structure that is very similar to a beta-lactam? Sure enough, Extrict A had, you know, some level of this beta-lactam activity and Extrict B had some levels of beta-lactam. So we know that the beta-lactam's work by inhibiting the cell structure, breaking down the cell structure. The funny part is that Extrict A, even though it had less beta-lactam, it was about 8,000 times more effective at destroying bacteria than penicillin. So we are, these plants are making these little things that behave like penicillin, but are better. And this is, you know, and just imagine, you know, if you were a plant, you can't get up and go to the doctor. So you have to create this in dodging the centimicrobials. And through millions of years, this centimicrobials are pretty darn effective. And that's without even talking about all of the different phytochemicals within the plant that might work in synergy to help this penicillin-like substances work even better. But what about, you know, the other type of extracts that didn't have beta-lactam-lactam activity? Well, those we decided, you know, let's try to see if they work as Cipro as a quinolone. So we did this gels and the way that gyrus inhibitors or the way that Cipro works, it goes into your DNA and kind of prevents your DNA from, like, expanding and it tangles it and it breaks it. So you can see if Cipro right here. You can see how we increase the dosis. The negative shows that the gyrus didn't work. And, sorry, the negative shows that the gyrus was working and the positive that, no, the negative shows that the gyrus was inhibited, the positive shows that the gyrus worked. So the gyrus expands the DNA, so it's like if I had a bag, if there wasn't any gyrase, it would stay all bunched up and I could throw it across the room. If the gyrus worked, then it would be inflated and I couldn't throw it. So those dependent, you know, the more Cipro that you added, the more inhibition of gyrase. So when you have our control, astragalus, astragalus doesn't work. We know that, that's not an antimicrobial. Extract C and extract D had those dependence. The more extract you use, the more you inhibit the gyrase. Those two extracts worked just like Cipro. So now we have these two different kinds of botanicals that we can categorize into different mechanisms of action. So we have beta-lactam, extract A and extract B working more as a penicillin-like compound and then you have extract C and D working at the nucleus to prevent DNA replication. So that's pretty cool. Now we have these botanicals that we know are working and we can use them to treat dysbiosis or to treat things like bacterial infections and that's super cool. But what happens when these botanicals are working like Cipro? Who would take Cipro in this room? Have you guys ever heard about Cipro in tearing your Achilles tendon? These botanicals are working just like Cipro. We need to be very careful with how we dose botanicals, with how we prepare botanicals, when we use botanicals, because within botanical medicine, a lot of these botanicals have different things that they can do for you. You can take something that is going to be, that is gonna help you with your lymph flow and it's gonna reverse diabetes and it's going to be antimicrobial. How can we be super specific and use the right botanical for your disease process? So that's very scary and I don't want to, but I'm gonna give you something right now. So if you ever taken Cipro or if you are prescribed Cipro, there's this study where they took dogs and they chelated their magnesium and the incidence of Achilles tendon stairs skyrocketed. But with dogs that had good magnesium status, no problem. Now the problem is that magnesium actually binds to the quinolone-like structure and renders it inactive. So it's not like you can say here's your Cipro and here's your magnesium because it won't work. So it's not just supplementing, it's more about having good magnesium status. I was at the American Association of naturopathic physicians and we were discussing this nuances and someone said, well, maybe we need to prescribe, whenever we prescribe Cipro, we should prescribe magnesium, much like when we prescribe antibiotics, we prescribe probiotics. But then Cipro and magnesium don't play well together. So maybe doing topical magnesium would be a good idea so they're not competing in the intestinal tract. We don't know, this is not being studied and there's a lot of people that suffer from Cipro toxicity. So that's cool and all, but let's make some lemonade. There are chemotherapeutic agents that work at the gyrase level, just like Cipro. You know, Dr. Rubison works on topoisomerase two and then some others work on topoisomerase one. So what if we tested these botanicals to see if they had different levels of activity to different types of gyrases or topoisomerases? Wouldn't that be cool if these botanicals could have all these different uses? So again, this is for topo two, you can see that extract C and extract D work better than Cipro, that's the topo two well-established treatment. But extract C and extract D also worked on topo one where Cipro didn't work. And extract C and D had both topo four activity and topo two activity where extract C just inhibited topo one, so it was more specific. So now we have identified botanicals that not only have a potential against bacteria, but if we are able to maybe isolate the compound or maybe create a little bit more evidence or research behind it, maybe we have other options to these chemotherapeutic agents. And because they are different and maybe different enough, maybe we can evade this problem of resistance. So that's a pretty cool hypothesis, isn't it? Well, we tested it. So you can see right here that this is cancer cells that are proliferating without being stopped and that's as stragglers are controlled, but when you use either of the extracts, you can see as the more extracts you add to this cervical cancer cells, those cells begin to apoptose and you prevent the growth of the cells and this is just using botanicals. What about pancreatic cancer? Well, pancreatic cancer, same thing, those dependence, as stragglers are controlled, and the more botanical that you add to the cells, those cells begin to apoptose. So this is to show that these botanical preparations are very, very powerful and we need to be careful when we use them with the spansum and we try to treat ourselves. So in conclusion, botanical medicine can be a really good gateway or a really good way of preventing this 2050 epidemic of bacterial resistance, but just like we made a huge mistake with the overuse of regular antibiotics, we need to make sure that we're really judicious and we really respect the power of botanical medicine. Additionally, we need to continue looking at traditional medicine. None of this research would have been done if we didn't have the oral tradition of having learned from different grandmas and grandpas that if you use these different herbs, you could cure infection. Where do you start in any other situation? If we want to fight something like Zika, how do we even begin to test plants if we don't have at least a blueprint? And then secondly, make sure we test this blueprint and we're open to finding out that maybe we're wrong about certain things. And then finally, being very careful that if you're using a botanical for a certain thing, you're doing it at the right dose for the right amount of time and using the right preparation. And by doing those things, then you can prevent the spread of bacterial resistance or the bad things that can happen from the overuse of antibiotics. Do you guys have any questions? Thank you so much. Oh, you're welcome. For presenting very nice work. I consider myself rather ignorant in this field. Me too. Of course not, no. But my concern would be who are there any agencies that regulate which botanicals go to the market and how they're being used? Because there are a lot of products and they're over the counter. And I think that is a big part of the misuse of botanicals because most people don't refer to specialists to use them. It's beyond over the counter. I can walk outside and I find, I've been looking at all the plants and I can make medicine just from like the different weeds that I can find right here. So it's beyond over the counter. It's like, but it's cool. You know, it's like this kind of like markets approach. You know, it's like everyone has access to this medicine. The cool thing is that evolution and entropy have given us a couple of like safeguards. In order for medicine, botanical medicine to be effective, you have to be very specific with the way you extract it. So there are some medications that like, for example, if you use the fresh plant, have no antibacterial activity. And we're running this experiments with this extracts and then all of a sudden they stop working and we're like, what's going on? And what happened is that the place where we were getting those botanical extractions thought, oh, fresh is going to be stronger. So they went from dry to fresh and all the antibacterial activity went away. So you have to have purpose. For example, a lot of the carbonate herbs that we use, things for indigestion or things that we use as spices. They happen to have really good activity like oregano and things like that. But if you use them to spice your food, they might not. So there has to be some purpose. As of who's regulating this? No one, no one. And that's why I want to talk about this at this level because we need to respect mother nature. And sometimes we think, oh, it's natural. I won't take Cipro, but would you take this medicine? Oh, yeah, totally, it's natural. Yeah, I'll take that. So thank you. You're welcome. So a new study, a new field because of legalization of cannabinoids, it's anecdotal, but there's stories of cannabinoids being used to cure MRSA infections. Even stories where friends sneak CBD oil into the hospital, they seriously infected MRSA's patient and the patient becomes cured. Do you have any testing of the cannabinoids? So every time we present something along the lines of resistance or bacterial resistance, someone says, have you tried allium? Or have you tried, and it was like, well, no, but maybe, yeah, and yeah, so all of these plants have multiple mechanisms of action. At the beginning of the presentation, the ones that we actually characterized as having activity, there are a bunch of them actually. I think nine of them had pretty good activity that is comparable to vancomycin, okay? Of those nine, only four, we were able to decipher the actual way they work. So the other five, we don't know. We might have a completely new class of antimicrobial. Same thing with things like CBD and things like that. Now, we focused on those four, what A, because we're lazy and I knew that the mechanism was that and that we could prove it, and B, because we were interested in having a very specific mechanism, like we didn't want something that just destroyed the cell. So like, bleach kills MRSA, but we want something that is a little bit more surgical. And we're still working on trying to figure out how to understand how they work. Another thing with piggybacking on your question, we're in a really weird situation with cannabis and CBD and stuff like that, because there are no grants and the government is not allowing people to study it. So we're turning to Dr. Google and all these people trying to legalize and I don't have a dog in that fight, but I do believe that when everything is said and done, a lot of these claims are going to be, we're overselling it. I could be completely wrong and I hope I am, but we need to be very careful with how we promote cannabis. Let's research it, let's study it, let's see it, let's see hard evidence. And in the end, that's going to be way better because we're creating this super big monster that is going to be deflated with a pen, so. Totally, so we can't study it. So you have one side yelling, it's the end all cure all and then on the other side they're like, it's not and we're not going to study it, so. Hi, very good lecture. Being a conventionally trained practitioner and also going through IFM, we learn a little bit about antimicrobial botanicals but not nearly enough. And I'm just curious if you would know of the best source, like I know there's the natural medicine database, but what would be a source for a practitioner or somebody just to be able to be more careful and judiciously use these, which I know we don't know. Yeah, so there's really good studies out there on a couple of botanical products that work as well as refactamine that are being used for things like SIBO and dysbiosis. Those are, you know, that's about it. You know, we also have a paper that talks about like standardization of botanicals and there's no way to standardize botanicals. So, we don't know, it's super scary, just this morning I was walking, you know, around the dorms trying to look for a bathroom because I refused to pee in the sink. And someone asked me, hey, you know, I have a couple of questions, you know, have a family member doing paleo and you know, she's getting better, you know. Oh, she's also using oregano. Is that, you know, is cool. You know, oregano has really good antimicrobial properties. Do we really want to use oregano oil long-term? Do we really want to use, what if, had that person said to me, oh yeah, no, you know, she's feeling better, you know, she's taking penicillin every day, you know. No, you know, we wouldn't have the same reaction. And we really need to focus and we really need to, you know, ask people and ask practitioners and health coaches and anyone in the trenches that we need to respect this antimicrobial properties. So if these botanicals are using similar pathways and mechanisms of actions as the antimicrobials, the traditional ones, how's that going to prevent the crisis in 2050? Excellent question. So let's say I'm able to categorize or identify the mechanism of action of those nine drugs. And out of those nine drugs, four of them have completely, you know, different mechanisms of action. You know, one acts like a Cipro, one acts like penicillin, the other one acts like erythromycin, you know, the other one acts, you know, another way. Right now, the way we make botanical formulations, it's like we walk into the store and we're like, I'll take you and I'll take you and I'll take you. So we can use evolutionary medicine and not use plans that are closely related and kind of hypothesize that they're going to have different mechanisms of action. And if we understand each different mechanism of action, now we can create cocktails with different mechanisms of action. And then we can add things like echinacea. We can add, you know, things that are going to upregulate your immune system. And now we can create this little cocktail of different mechanisms with synergism that I can make right now without having to go through the FDA and do all this approval. Because this is traditional medicine, this is how we do things. So understanding these mechanisms, knowing how they are working, you know, are there herbs that are ineffective against gram-negative bacteria? We don't know. Are there herbs that are effective at, you know, at maybe they're good antivirals, but not against, you know, this type, you know, we don't know. So if we identify all of this and we can use all these recipes and all these rubrics to create things and by using them at the right dosage for the appropriate amount of time, then we can destroy even things like MRSA. First of all, every time I spend with you, I love you more and more. Thank you for that incredible talk. I also, you know, want to say that I really appreciate your cautioning about using some of this stuff because I went holistic right out of the gates when I was diagnosed with MS in 1986, started using essential oils, which I, you know, didn't really have problems with, but I started ingesting echinacea and things like that, which were not good for me with MS. Like echinacea actually did the reverse. It didn't really help me, you know, and I was doing a lot of herbal teas that was really not helpful. So I never really thought about the power. I mean, I was hopeful that this herb would help me, but I didn't realize that doing something wrong could also hurt me, even though Mother Nature provides, you know. And then finally, I have to make a comment about cannabis and CBD. I've used cannabis for the treatment of MS for over 32 years. I use cannabis every day. It is a big part of the work that I do in the community. And I can tell you that not only do I see people with MS like myself who had involuntary jumping of their limbs and their body that it completely heals in a second. I've seen people use cannabis for three days that are in a wheelchair, get up and take four steps they haven't taken in years, and that's the only change. So I don't think there's gonna be a bubble in the cannabis movement, I have to say. And CBD, I can also tell you that mothers, when mothers knock down my door to tell me how CBD has stopped seizures in their children to adult sons as high as 47 years old, I really believe that again, these are powerful gifts for Mother Nature and they're doing amazing things. And maybe, you know, cannabis and MS, there's a marriage there. We need to study it. Yeah, seizures and CBD, there's a marriage there, but for the people that cannabis and CBD are helping, it's changing their life and I'm here to tell you it continues to change my life and it hasn't messed up my head and it hasn't given me one single side effect. So, and sadly I took 10 doses of Cipro, 14 day intervenance of Ancomycin and Amoxicillin and that's what my MS doctors treated me with. So, and that's why we need to put research into it. Like it, yeah. Just a quick comment. As a child, if this is going to be a bizarre story, but my mother put cabbage juice in my ears almost daily in the summertime. So she would collect cabbage and she would scrape it and she would pull cabbage juice in my ears because we were in the water all the time and she didn't want us to get infected so to solve her property is a cabbage. The drugs that I can't take now is the sulfidy. And I also developed a severe allergy, like terrible allergy to eggs, I feel terrible. But I just asked, as I hear your speech, it just made me think, did my mother program a sulfur? I think it would be a cabbage patch. You know, you don't look like a cabbage patch kid. So, yeah, but maybe there was some immune training and maybe it was like, what's this cabbage juice? Let's attack it and now you have a sulfur. You know, completely plausible. Yeah.