Medicine isn't always pretty, but it could be

Many ancient and traditional medicinal recipes call for animal parts, but modern medicine has its share of animal ingredients, too, and I ain’t just talking about how grandma told you chicken soup would cure your cold.

From bear gallbladders to tiger testicles, bird beaks to fish bladders and deer eyes to alligator skin, animal body parts in traditional medicines are believed to cure everything from acne to cancer, malaria to erectile dysfunction and phlegmy lungs to organ failure.

I know, it’s easy for us here in the cheap plastic seats of the 21st century to roll our eyes and say, “Dude, a tea made from dried tiger testes and drank from a hollow rhinoceros horn is not going to improve your love life and ensure that you only have male children who will provide for you in the lavish manor to which you would like to become accustomed in your old age.”

I’m not discounting the traditional medicines, I’m just going to take a moment to ask why the best medicines seem to come from one body part of some rare animal. Do you really have to kill an entire elephant for a paste made from one of its toenails? Isn’t there a generic drug-equivalent cure for a hernia that’s less wasteful? Maybe the trimmings of a horse’s hoof will be just effective. If nothing else, my dog has proven hoof trimmings are a good emetic. (Yeah, you’re just going to have to do some homework and look that up.)

In fact, modern medicines have their own problems. Ever heard of a PMU farm? Literally, that means pregnant mare urine farm where pregnant mares are tied in stalls all day and equipped with fancy diaper-like collection units to harvest their hormone-rich urine to make “natural” estrogen.

This sounds like fake news doesn’t it — and I don’t mean news you disagree with so you’re gonna call it fake and all. I mean real fake news that was made up out of someone’s imagination. Nope. it’s for real.

I’m supposed to be up in arms about it because I love horses, but I’m more of a “while we’re looking into whether or not this is the best solution, how often do the horses get breaks?” kind of person … because: gelatin-based foods and gel-caps, heparin, chondroitin. glucosamine, calcium, lanolin, thyroid injections, pancreatic enzymes, heme iron, vitamin D3. They’re all animal byproducts.

I hope I didn’t just ruin some vegan’s day with any of that information.

Here’s something to make everybody happy, though. Some folks in Thailand figured out how to make an animal byproduct for human usage that doesn’t involve killing the creature or even making it uncomfortable. In fact, they lead a pretty sweet life of luxury and pampering.

Agence France Press reported July 19 that Thai farmer Phatinisiri Thangkeaw makes an extra $320 to $650 a month harvesting slime from her herd of 1,000 giant snails. She is the owner of just one of the 80 snail farms in the area a few hours from Bangkok.

The snails are actually a scourge of the region, feeding on the rice crops, so rice farmers collect and sell the snails to slime farmers who feed the snails fresh organic vegetables, grains and mushrooms then collect the snails’ prodigious slime byproduct every three weeks.

In its raw form, the slime is sold to Aden International, a Thai-based cosmetics company, that sterilizes and refines the slime which it primarily ships as a high-end collagen-rich product to Korea and the U.S.

Aden’s founder Kitpong Puttarathuvanun sells the serum and he supplies Korean and American cosmetic companies with a dried powder at $58,200 per kilogram

Gold, the article says, is currently worth $46,300 a kilogram.

“We found that our slime was very intense because the snails eat everything (healthy) ... producing good quality slime,” he told AFP.

The mucus is used to help skin look young again and, Kitpong said, it also can be used to heal sunburns and wounds.

This slime story is the future of medicine and should be made into the feel-good movie of the year. The rice farmers win, the slime farmers win, the cosmetic company wins, the people are made youthful and well again, and those once-hated, nasty, slimy snails get to be the heroes.

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I think I would have to buy tissues instead of popcorn at the theatre at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40/.