Una
de Gato Herb
by
Nicole Maxwell
Note: Una de Gato,
Uncaria tomentosa, is commonly called Cat's
Claw. The thorns that grow on the branches of
the Una de Gato are shaped like a cat's claw,
hence the name Cat's Claw Herb.
reprinted from Witch-Doctor's Apprentice,
Hunting for Medicinal Plants in the Amazon
by Nicole Maxwell, Citadel Press, 1990, Chapter
XXXIX, pages 376-381
There is one plant whose properties might, I think,
just possibly make it one of the most important
of all the healers in the rain forest. It might
meet a desperate need of present-day medicine
if, as it appears, it really does fortify and
return to vigorous activity a failing autoimmune
system.
I first heard of it purely by chance. The little
restaurant where I often lunched was crowded,
and the proprietor asked if he might give the
other seat at my table to a gentleman I had
never met. I said of course, and he brought over
a pink-cheeked, very neat, and very polite
middle-aged man. I always talk to strangers,
given a chance. I've learned a lot that way. The
man, Mario Arguellas, was a friendly sort of
person. When I said I was there because of my
interest in medicinal plants, his face lit up.
"But
that's what saved me," he said. "I was dying of
cancer, and plant medicines saved me."
We
immediately were friends. Telling me all about
his remarkable recovery, he mentioned having the
records of his illness from the Hospital del
Empleado in Lima. What luck! For once, I could
get some soundly documented evidence. People are
all too ready to add a little drama by insisting
they were near death when they tell of curing
anything more serious than a hangnail. Since he
had brought up the records, I could explain that
I'd studied in an American medical school and
would be interested in seeing how such things
were organized in Peru, and I could do it
without sounding like a district attorney
examining a defense witness.
He
brought me the file the following Sunday. As I
read it, I could feel my eyes bugging out. This
man had to be dead! Medical journals sometimes
describe inexplicable cases of spontaneous
remission in a cancer case that has been
diagnosed as terminal. Such things do
occasionally occur - nobody knows why. But a
case like this?
Nine
specialists had attended Mario Arguellas, and I
read the analyses they'd ordered. These
reported, among other things, a severe cystitis,
a generalized septicemia, and ten percent of
cancer cells in the bloodstream. That's a
massive metastasis. Terrible!
The
tests had just been finished when, early one
morning, two of the doctors came to his room and
said they were sorry, but he would have to leave
the hospital. Tomorrow they were all going on
strike.
The hastily summoned friends who came to take
him to their home were told that it didn't
really matter where he was; he was dying. If he
lasted as much as ten days more, they would be
very much surprised.
Mario's
friends knew a lot about plant medicine. They
immediately started their own course of
treatment. Among the plants they used were
chanca piedra for the urinary infection - it
helps with more than just kidney stones or
gallstones - and a few drops of sangre de grado
in a little water "to heal the blood." But the
most important thing, he told me, was the plant
uña de gato. They boiled twenty grams of the
grated dried plant material in a liter of water,
and he drank it throughout the day, every day.
His
improvement was phenomenal. "In two weeks," he
told me, "I was able to leave my bed."
The
doctors' strike lasted thirty-one days. When it
was over, he walked into the hospital. He
enjoyed telling me about their amazement, but
was a little disappointed that they hadn't
thought he was a ghost.
Before
long he went back to work. Doing what, I asked,
and I got another surprise: Seven hours a day he
taught ballet and classical Spanish dancing,
including flamenco, for the Iquitos branch of
the Ministry of Culture.
Those
years of dance training I'd taken so seriously
in my youth had taught me what stamina four or
five hours of ballet required. But I didn't work
at flamenco until much later, when I lived in
Paris. I was studying with the corps de ballet
of the Opéra Comique, so I was in pretty good
shape when, on a trip to Barcelona, I decided to
learn a little flamenco. I got a surprise. I
have never known any exercise that demands such
an output of energy as those prolonged zapateòs,
the very fast stamping with both feet that
sounds like loud castanets. That makes classical
ballet feel like strolling through the park. And
I was only twenty-two at that time.
Mario
Arguellas was in his middle fifties. He told me
he owed his good health to not smoking, not
drinking, eating sensibly, and taking a daily
dose of uña de gato, which he felt sure had
protected him from any recurrence of the cancer.
I
immediately started a search for the proper
botanical identification. There are eight plants
called uña de gato in Peru, and I wasn't able to
get a specimen of whatever it was that had done
the job. Mario got his supply from a man who
sold it in Lima, already finely ground and
packed in plastic bags. I knew only that the
plant came from a place in the foothills of the
jungle at an altitude of more than three
thousand feet. Climate, in any country whose
topography is as up-and-down as Peru's, is
dominated by altitude; as a general rule, higher
means colder, and different temperatures mean
different species. That was a help. I began
eliminating.
I could
have saved a lot of time if I'd asked Dr.
McDaniel, Adriana's boss, but I didn't know then
that uña de gato was among the quantities of
plants he had supplied to the anticancer
research program of the National Institutes of
Health. McDaniel later told me that Dr. Monroe
Wall, working on uña de gato, reported that they
were finding some very encouraging
tumor-inhibiting properties in it when the
Reagan Administration came into office and
canceled the research program.
Mario's
uña de gato, in some localities called garabato
casha or tambor huasca, is Uncaria tomentosa (Rubiaceae).
This is a woody vine which grows in the
foothills, chiefly at altitudes between seven or
eight hundred and twenty-five hundred meters. A
very similar lowland species, known by the same
set of local names, is Uncaria guianensis; it is
abundant in lower altitudes of the Peruvian
Amazon. It was U. tomentosa that cured Mario
Arguellas, but U. guianensis that Dr. Wall
studied. It appears that the two species are as
nearly identical in medicinal properties as they
are in appearance.
Some
time later I learned that a man whose lung
cancer was cured by uña de gato had, after
continuing dosage, found that he could walk
normally and even climb stairs, even though for
years he had been badly cripple by arthritis.
Then I got good evidence of its working wonders
for diabetics. Could it be that this plant might
perhaps be giving a tremendous boost to the
immune system? I couldn't think of any other way
of examining the diversity of its effects, its
ability to eliminate so many problems that, as
far as my limited knowledge let me guess,
appeared to have only one thing in common: they
were all degenerative diseases. In any case, I
had not enough knowledge to make judgments in
such a serious matter. And I knew nobody in
Iquitos I could get the right kind of
information from, so I put the matter aside.
Only
very recently have I found any more extensive
information on how some of these plants might
work to benefit so many problems affecting
different organs and functions. Lack of access
to scientific publications is a handicap.
News
media sometimes can be a useful source of
information, though I'm afraid the
pronouncements of "Madame Zuzu, the Mystical
Seeress, No CODs," might be about as reliable as
some of the more excitable publications. But now
and then I come across one that I know has
substance, like the story about several species
of tabebuia. These are commonly called pau
d'arco and ipe in Brazil, siete cueros in
Columbia, and tahuarí or sometimes palo de arco
in Peru. The species most abundant around
Iquitos is the yellow-flowered Tabebuia
chrysantha, Bignoniaceae, thought the
purple-flowered Tabenuia obscura can also be
found here and there.
A
clipping someone sent me from an unidentified
slick publication says research on this
botanical was done at the municipal hospital in
San Andre, a suburb of São Paulo, Brazil, and
gives glowing accounts of its success in
treating leukemia and other types of cancer with
more than one species of tabebuia. The tree's
ability to cure arthritis and diabetes too is
mentioned without specific data.
Any
clipping is much more useful if the name and
date of the publication it's cut from are given;
if not, it is almost impossible to get more
information from its contents.
Around
Iquitos Tabeuia chrysantha, locally called
tahuarí is well known, and praised as a means of
controlling diabetes. I heard that one of the
most important Peruvian businessmen keeps some
of it in his desk in every office he has
throughout the country. From gratitude for what
it has done for his diabetes, he made a vow to
have it always at hand to give to anyone who
needs it. But its tumor-inhibiting properties
have been less known here, though some of the
Linguists report its startling success as a
tumor or cancer cure in some of the tribes and
in the Yarinacocha villages of Tushmo, San José,
and Callao.
Peter
Rachau, who has been with the Urarina tribe, has
for several years been interested in native
botanical medicines. He tells of the use of
tahuarí also for liver and kidney disorders. And
he has more accounts of uña de gato's curing
tumors, which may or may not have been
malignant, in members of that tribe.
Peter attended an international congress of
ethnobotanists interested in tribal medicinal
plants in nearby Pucallpa a few months before I
saw him in Yarinacocha. Uña de gato was one of
the plants that was discussed, and several
scientists gave reports of their research. Peter
read me his notes.
An
Italian doctor, Giaccarino Paolo Francesco, gave
a long list of ailments for which it is used,
and Peter quoted him: "One mechanism of its
working is that it activates T-lymphocytes and
macrophages." An unnamed Spanish doctor proved
that it normalizes the immunoglobulins.
Macrophages gobble up harmful particles or
cells, and immunoglobulins are proteins in the
body's fluids that combat infections.
Another
report stated that no toxicity had been found,
even with such massive doses as one gram of
evaporated essence of the active principle per
kilo of body weight.
Later, when I got a very nasty infection, I
decided to see what uña de gato could do to help
my own immune system fight back. I had suffered
the same problem some twenty-odd years earlier,
and I learned then that it was the sort of
localized but very stubborn infection that could
only be cured by surgery, so I'd had the
operation, which kept me in the hospital for a
fortnight.
Remembering the reports about how the plant
boosted the activity of the body's own defense
mechanisms, I started on a course of
tetracyclines and added three doses daily of uña
de gato. It worked beautifully. In only a week,
the problem was gone, and it has not returned. I
decided to continue taking it on general
principles, but found one disadvantage, though
some might consider it a boon. I have for years
had white hair. Phyllis Manus, a Linguist
friend, warned me that uña de gato sometimes
turns gray hair back to its original color. My
hair wasn't gray; it is white, and had been for
a long time, so I didn't worry. After the
infection was beaten, I kept on taking uña de
gato. There was a lot of flu around, and it
might help me avoid it. I did not get flu, but
after another couple of months I began to notice
an occasional dark hair showing up among the
snowy ones that I've been so vain about. And
just a few more, every week or so. That was
disturbing, so I stopped taking the brew for a
couple of months. But the dark hairs have kept
right on. They probably are only a few each
week, but lately one or two friends have
noticed. I don't like that at all; a woman has a
few things to be vain about when she's in her
eighties.
Recently I have learned of other plants which
seem to work similarly for an equally unlikely
variety of ills. I shall have to ask Dr.
McDaniel for two of them and see if they will
allow my hair to remain properly white. |
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Uña de Gato