We have many passing fads in our natural medicine industry. They are usually one hyped single ingredient at a time, such as calcium, resveratrol, noni juice, acai berry, etc. The marketing campaign is heavy, and it is often times pushed through multi-level marketing, further illustrating its temporary status as we Americans move onto the next fad.

In my book, "Reduce Your Healthcare Costs Through Natural Medicine" I discuss this, and have entitled it our American "mononutrient fixation". The simple fact is that we are mammals who rely on a wide array of nutrients, while minimizing insults to the body like oxidation, etc. So, each single ingredient fad which comes out will not cure your fibromyalgia, etc. As I often highlight in my book, we MUST have multifactorial approaches to any condition.

With that said, another wonderful tool within natural medicine is curcumin. It is a current fad, and it's very valuable. In fact, curcumin has thousands of clinical trials/research articles under its belt, and is possibly the most studied natural medicine to date. It is so important that, many drug and research companies have made curcumin analogs, or synthetic versions of curcumin, so they can of course be patented, and hence secured. This is nothing new, as roughly half of all medicine comes from nature

The problem is, we don't know what downstream problems we're causing by altering this molecule. These drugs, which will some day hit the market, may be the holy grail, or as so often, we may find in a few years they have nasty side effects.

In a paper studying curcumin analogs (think pharma guys) they state how wonderful natural curcumin is, and I quote.

 "Besides being a potent anti-inflammatory agent, curcumin is also a potent anti-proliferative agent. No cancer cell type has yet been found where curcumin lacks anti=proliferative effects, and this effect is selective toward tumor cells, it has minimum effect on normal cells". (Biochem Pharmacol June 2010)

I carry within my line a curcumin product which is specially bound to phosphatidyl choline which yields 29 times the absorption rate as compared to standard curcumin. For more info go to myoptimalhealthcare.com