Contrary to television commercials and prevailing medical practices, inflammation should not be suppressed or treated as a disease condition. Rather, it ought to be viewed and supported as the body's most fundamental reaction to tissue irritation. Since it is the body's first line of defense against outside invasion or stress to any of the body's tissues, it should be evident that any irritant may cause inflammation.

Logically speaking, inflammation should not be impeded or prevented. Yet, suppressing the symptoms of fever, redness, swelling, or pain through pharmaceutical means has become usual and customary. With this in mind, I would like to report on two new drugs that were released in 2002: analgesic/dietary supplement and a drug for Crohn's disease.

On March 15, 2002, Bayer began airing 15-second television ads for its new analgesic/dietary supplement. The ads urged women, "take care of your future now by taking calcium for your bones with aspirin for your heart. Heart disease is the number one killer of women."

Aspirin has long been recommended to reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke in patients who have already suffered from these conditions. But researchers insist that while aspirin lowers the risk of having a heart attack, it is not recommended as a preventative for people who have a low risk of developing heart disease.

Many people don't know their heart disease risk and -- perhaps out of fear -- will decide to treat themselves and rely somewhat on TV and magazine advertising for information. Yet, do either the general public or even some health care professionals really know how aspirin works? Probably not.

As review, when a cell is damaged, it releases substances called prostaglandins which carry a chemical message to the brain that the cell is in need of repair. The brain responds to the signal by initiating an inflammatory response (healing process) that is needed to repair the damage. Aspirin destroys the prostaglandins so that the distress signal is not sent to the brain, and the healing process is interrupted.

Prostaglandins also maintain a protective lining in the stomach. Their destruction by aspirin damages the stomach lining. Between 30-40% of all hospital admissions for bleeding ulcers are caused by aspirin. This is because aspirin thins the blood. A single dose of two regular strength aspirin affects normal clotting for as long as seven days. That is why patients scheduled for any type of surgery are warned not to take aspirin for several days prior to their surgery.

Use of aspirin during the last three months of pregnancy may cause bleeding problems in the fetus before or during delivery or in the newborn infant. It may increase the length of pregnancy, prolong labor, cause other problems during delivery, and even cause bleeding in the mother before, during, or after delivery.

Preliminary studies have shown that the immune-enhancing drug, Leukine, has demonstrated promise for relief of the symptoms of Crohn's disease. This is surprising because medicine has long thought that Crohn's disease was a so-called "autoimmune disease," a condition caused by an overactive immune system.

Crohn's disease is an inflammatory response in the bowel and is characterized by abdominal pain, diarrhea, abscesses and even ulceration of the bowel. This condition affects 500,000 Americans and while it can occur at any age, it is predominantly found in early adulthood, the late teens, and early twenties.

The November 9, 2002 issue of The Lancet described the opinions of researchers at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis. Leukine is presently used to increase the size and function of white blood cells in patients whose immune function is being depleted by chemotherapy used for the treatment of cancer. It is estimated that it will take five years for the FDA to approve the injection of Leukine for use in treatment of Crohn's disease.

At the present time, Remicade is used to improve immune function in these cases. Infusions of Remicade are also used in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. In August 2000, Mayo Clinic announced that immune-suppression for that "autoimmune" disease is contraindicated because it seems that RA patients have exhausted, not overactive, immune systems. The use of immune-enhancing drugs such as Remicade and Leukine represents a major change in medical treatment that presently uses immune-suppressing drugs, such as prednisone, which may produce life-threatening side effects such as infections and heart attacks.

Both of these new drugs seek to treat the effect -- not the cause -- of the defensive inflammatory response. Perhaps medicine is slowly getting the picture that a more commonsense approach would be to remove the stress and nourish immune function, but that is not the pharmaceutical approach.