What the doctor didn't order
Herbal medicine Many Australians believe in herbal medicine, whatever the science says. But Dr Ian Musgrave always counsels caution on what remedies to rely on.
“The simple fact that herbal medicines are drugs is underappreciated, or not understood at all, by most people. They include good drugs, bad drugs and completely useless drugs but they are drugs nonetheless, and therein lies a lot of grief,” Dr Musgrave warns.
“As well as being part of traditional remedies, we could very well get new drugs, like antibiotics, from herbs and plants. But we need to be cautious.”
And yet the senior lecturer in pharmacology in the University’s School of Medicine is very interested in the potential of nature for treating degenerative diseases, including Parkinson’s and notably Alzheimer’s disease. But there is no contradiction or even ambivalence inDr Musgrave’s position on medicine from nature. Although herbal medicines can be a source of new drugs, “sometimes the medical effect of what we extract has very little connection with what the herbal medicine is traditionally used for. You have to evaluate it carefully,” he says.
It is what he is doing with colleagues across the University and in other institutions and disciplines as they research nerve function and what degrades it.
He is a part of a promising new research approach to Alzheimer’s. A major cause of brain degeneration is the way proteins fold into the wrong shape and form chains that kill cells. In a process that can start years before the symptomatic impact on a person is obvious, the chains reproduce too fast for the brain to break them down.
Dr Musgrave is focused on ways to stop this “misfolding” from happening, including the use of molecules from plants such as green tea. The same approach also offers opportunities for treating HIV.
But there is a way to go. Dr Musgrave warns that science can’t yet explain why the normally innocuous proteins start misfold | 
