Khasiat Pegagan untuk Tumpas TBC (Tuberkulosis)

Testimoni Pegagan
Seorang teman bercerita, betapa frustrasinya ia menumpas tuberkulosis (TB) paru-paru. Digempur pakai obat-obatan medis, si penyakit tetap saja eksis. Ia juga panik, karena katanya, bakteri TB bisa kebal terhadap gempuran obat yang diracik apotik. Untunglah, saat nyaris frustrasi, ia “menemukan” pegagan.

Menjalani “takdir” sebagai penderita TB paru-paru memang tak gampang. Jika tidak ulet, alih-alih sembuh, pasien bisa mati bosan. Maklum, proses penyembuhan TB, selain cukup sulit, juga makan waktu lama, berkisar 3 – 6 bulan. Itu pun dengan catatan, pasien berdisiplin minum obat dan rajin memeriksakan diri ke dokter.

Lamanya pengobatan itulah – apalagi jika disertai kendala biaya – yang kerap menyebabkan pasien frustrasi. Ya frustrasi minum obat, ya bosan menanggung derita. Padahal, disiplin minum obat menjadi faktor penentu dalam proses penyembuhan. Pengobatan yang tidak tuntas dapat menyebabkan bakteri TB resisten terhadap beragam obat konvensional, termasuk obat kombinasi.

Dengan kata lain, pasien TB sebenarnya dilarang keras menoleransi kata bosan, apalagi sampai putus asa. Itu sebabnya, buat teman tadi, perjumpaan dengan pegagan dan kawan sejawatnya menjadi sangat berarti. Paling tidak, ia merasa tak “sendiri” lagi menghadapi tuberkulosis. Ketika banyak sanak saudara dan handai taulan menjauh lantaran takut tertular, pegagan dan kawan-kawan menjadi teman paling setia.

Yang paling penting, harga mereka murah dan tak membuat kantung cekak jika dikonsumsi dalam kurun waktu lama.

Pegagan Menghambat & menghancurkan

Pegagan atau nama kerennya Centella asiatica itu tumbuhan liar yang ada di dataran rendah, sampai sekitar 2.500 m di atas permukaan air laut.

Secara empiris, biasa digunakan sebagai tonik, antiinfeksi, antirematik, penenang, mempercepat penyembuhan luka, dan diuretik. Berbagai penelitian telah dilakukan guna mendukung manfaat empirisnya.

Misalnya, penelitian yang merujuk pegagan sebagai antiinflamasi, antioksidan, antitumor, atau untuk meningkatkan daya ingat (susunan saraf pusat), eksem (luka terbuka), dan hepatitis. Hal itu berkaitan dengan kandungan senyawa yang dimiliki pegagan, yaitu asiaticiside, thankuniside, medecassoside, brahmoside, brahminoside, madastic acid, vitamin B1, B2, dan B6.

Dari berbagai penelitian in vitro terhadap pegagan menemukan kemampuannya menghancurkan berbagai bakteri penyebab infeksi, seperti Staphylococcus aureus, Escherechia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Salmonella typhi, dan sejenisnya. Sementara dalam bentuk infus atau ekstrak etanol, tumbuhan ini dipercaya dapat menghambat pertumbuhan bakteri.

Laorpuksa A. dan kawan-kawan dalam penelitian pada 1988 membuktikan, estrak air pegagan dapat melawan bakteri yang menyebabkan infeksi pada saluran napas. Sementara Herbert D. dan kawan-kawan dari Tuberculosis Research Center di India mencoba efek pegagan pada bakteri tuberkulosis H37Rv secara in vitro. Hasilnya, pegagan tidak langsung berefek pada bakteri tuberkulosis. Namun, Herbert menyarankan penelitian lebih lanjut terhadap senyawa aktif asiaticoside.

Feeling Herbert terbukti benar. Berdasarkan penelitian lanjutan, senyawa aktif pegagan itu ternyata dapat melawan Mycobakterium tuberculosis dan Bacillus leprae (Oliver-Bever, 1986). Penelitian berikutnya yang dilakukan Walter H. Lewis juga menyatakan, pegagan termasuk kelompok tanaman yang menghasilkan zat seperti antibiotika dan asiaticoside.

Uji Keampuhan Pegagan
Keampuhan pegagan juga telah diuji coba oleh Boeteau P. dan kawan-kawan, yang menginokulasi binatang percobaan marmut dengan bakteri basilus tuberkulosis selama 15 hari. Injeksi 0,5 ml 4% asiaticoside yang diberikan pada marmut, terbukti dapat mengurangi jumlah lesi tuberkular di paru-paru, hati, dan limpa. Senyawa asiaticoside membuat pegagan tak hanya dapat menghambat pertumbuhan bakteri tuberkulosis, tapi juga berpotensi sebagai imunomodulator – peningkat daya tahan tubuh.

Secara empiris, pemanfaatan pegagan untuk membasmi tuberkulosis paru-paru dapat dilakukan dengan berpedoman pada resep berikut. Cuci 30 – 60 g pegagan segar, lalu rebus dalam 3 gelas air sampai tersisa 1 gelas, dan diminum 3 kali sehari. Untuk TB kulit, lumatkan pegagan, kemudian tempelkan pada bagian yang sakit.

NB:
Utk atasi TBC herbal yang direkomendasikan terdiri dari :
1. Cakar ayam
2. Sambiloto
3. Pegagan
MInum 3x1 selama 1 bulan kemudian jeda 1 minggu dan lanjutkan lagi.
Info lebih lanjut bs contact : 081310343598 , budiprakoso98@gmail.com atau YM : budi_prakoso98

Sumber:
http://cintaherbal.wordpress.com (dikutip dari Khasiat Pegagan, dari penumpas TBC sampai peningkat daya ingat, www.depkes.go.id)

white wash....

loving these white wash spaces.....they feel so clean and crisp. if only i didn't have sippy cups, crayons, and grape jelly to deal with :)

*images courtesy of donna griffith, unknown, the city sage, unknown

hello everyone!! i have lots of stuff to do today since i have been away for a week but i love this quote and thought it would be a great way to start off monday!! and i couldn't help throwing in a pic of walker on vacay!! his dad, uncle, and grandfather caught some crab and so he thought he would show them off :)

*images courtesy of forever love stoned, me

Image Parsing: Unifying Segmentation, Detection, and Recognition

Recently I have posted about the connection between object category detection and semantic image segmentation. While delving into this problem more deeply, I have found the paper denoted in the title of this post.

The ICCV 2003 paper by Tu et al. was among the three Marr prize winners. And it is really a prominent piece of work! In the introduction to the special Marr prize IJCV issue, Bill Triggs featured the paper as one that "would have been particularly pleasing to David Marr", because of "its bold attack on the central problem of perceptual organization and whole scene understanding". Here is the journal version of the paper.

The authors combined discriminative and generative models, which resulted to the unified framework for image parsing. For each image the corresponding parsing tree could be found. The root of the tree represents the whole scene. On the next level, nodes represent semantic fragments, such as human faces, text, or textured regions. The leaves of the tree correspond to the pixels of the image.

The approach differs drastically from the vanilla CRF framework in the way that the structure of the parsing tree is dynamic while the CRF structure remains constant and just interaction models between the pairs of sites may change. The goal is to obtain the tree that maximizes the posterior probability given the image. The directed search in the space of valid trees is performed by means of Markov chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC). The possible tree changes like split and merge of regions, varying the border between regions, are defined. Such changes are described in terms of learnable Markov chain transition kernels.

What they actually did is they effectively combined top-down and bottom-up approaches. In a nutshell, the bottom-up (discriminative) method generates the hypotheses of pixel labels and object positions using the local neighbourhood, and the top-down generative model is then built making use of those hypotheses. The latest guarantees the consistency of the output and the optimum of its posterior probability.

Okay, what does it mean for the issue of detection and segmentation convergence? Because the shapes of objects are determined implicitly during the recognition, and stuff regions are detected by their colour and texture, the problem of semantic image segmentation is actually solved. Moreover, multi-scale semantic segmentation is performed during the parsing. Therefore, image parsing seems to be the most general formulation of image recognition problem.

The nodes of a parsing tree, which belong to the same depth level, are not connected (right, because it is a tree). This means that spatial interactions could not be modelled directly. A totally different approach was introduced in another Marr prize winning paper by Desai et al [2009]. They also use bottom-up tests to generate hypotheses on the object locations and then use CRF over those location to take spatial context into account. They model different kinds of inter-class and intra-class interactions. Thus, they ensure that the objects in the image (described by their bounding boxes) are arranged correctly, e.g. a cup is likely to be on a table (spatial arrangement), while a train could not be close to a ship (mutual exclusion).

It seems that the two papers exploit the two different forms of information (aggregation vs. spatial interactions), which are mutually redundant to a certain extent, but do not completely exhaust each other. It seems that the group of researchers who will successfully combine those approaches will receive some 201x Marr prize.

Can a Statin Neutralize the Cardiovascular Risk of Unhealthy Dietary Choices?

The title of this post is the exact title of a recent editorial in the American Journal of Cardiology (1). Investigators calculated the "risk for cardiovascular disease associated with the total fat and trans fat content of fast foods", and compared it to the "risk decrease provided by daily statin consumption". Here's what they found:

The risk reduction associated with the daily consumption of most statins, with the exception of pravastatin, is more powerful than the risk increase caused by the daily extra fat intake associated with a 7-oz hamburger (Quarter Pounder®) with cheese and a small milkshake. In conclusion, statin therapy can neutralize the cardiovascular risk caused by harmful diet choices.

Routine accessibility of statins in establishments providing unhealthy food might be a rational modern means to offset the cardiovascular risk. Fast food outlets already offer free condiments to supplement meals. A free statin-containing accompaniment would offer cardiovascular benefits, opposite to the effects of equally available salt, sugar, and high-fat condiments. Although no substitute for systematic lifestyle improvements, including healthy diet, regular exercise, weight loss, and smoking cessation, complimentary statin packets would add, at little cost, 1 positive choice to a panoply of negative ones.

Wow. Later in the editorial, they recommend "a new and protective packet, “MacStatin,” which could be sprinkled onto a Quarter Pounder or into a milkshake." I'm not making this up!

I can't be sure, but I think there's a pretty good chance the authors were being facetious in this editorial, in which case I think a) it's hilarious, b) most people aren't going to get the joke. If they are joking, the editorial is designed to shine a light on the sad state of mainstream preventive healthcare. Rather than trying to educate people and change the deadly industrial food system, which is at the root of a constellation of health problems, many people think it's acceptable to partially correct one health risk by tinkering with the human metabolism using drugs. To be fair, most people aren't willing to change their diet and lifestyle habits (and perhaps for some it's even too late), so frustrated physicians prescribe drugs to mitigate the risk. I accept that. But if our society is really committed to its own health and well-being, we'll remove the artificial incentives that favor industrial food, and educate children from a young age on how to eat well.

I think one of the main challenges we face is that our current system is immensely lucrative for powerful financial interests. Industrial agriculture lines the pockets of a few large farmers and executives (while smaller farmers go broke and get bought out), industrial food processing concentrates profit among a handful of mega-manufacturers, and then people who are made ill by the resulting food spend an exorbitant amount of money on increasingly sophisticated (and expensive) healthcare. It's a system that effectively milks US citizens for a huge amount of money, and keeps the economy rolling at the expense of the average person's well-being. All of these groups have powerful lobbies that ensure the continuity of the current system. Litigation isn't the main reason our healthcare is so expensive in the US; high levels of chronic disease, expensive new technology, a "kitchen sink" treatment approach, and inefficient private companies are the real reasons.

If the editorial is serious, there are so many things wrong with it I don't even know where to begin. Here are a few problems:

1. They assume the risk of heart attack conveyed by eating fast food is due to its total and trans fat content, which is simplistic. To support that supposition, they cite one study: the Health Professionals Follow-up Study (2). This is one of the best diet-health observational studies conducted to date. The authors of the editorial appear not to have read the study carefully, because it found no association between total or saturated fat intake and heart attack risk, when adjusted for confounding variables. The number they quoted (relative risk = 1.23) was before adjustment for fiber intake (relative risk = 1.02 after adjustment), and in any case, it was not statistically significant even before adjustment. How did that get past peer review? Answer: reviewers aren't critical of hypotheses they like.
   
2. Statins mostly work in middle-aged men, and reduce the risk of heart attack by about one quarter. The authors excluded several recent unsupportive trials from their analysis. Dr. Michel de Lorgeril reviewed these trials recently (3). For these reasons, adding a statin to fast food would probably have a negligible effect on the heart attack risk of the general population.
   
3. "Statins rarely cause negative side effects." BS. Of the half dozen people I know who have gone on statins, all of them have had some kind of negative side effect, two of them unpleasant enough that they discontinued treatment against their doctor's wishes. Several of them who remained on statins are unlikely to benefit because of their demographic, yet they remain on statins on their doctors' advice.
   
4. Industrial food is probably the main contributor to heart attack risk. Cultures that don't eat industrial food are almost totally free of heart attacks, as demonstrated by a variety of high-quality studies (4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9). No drug can replicate that, not even close.
   

I have an alternative proposal. Rather than giving people statins along with their Big Mac, why don't we change the incentive structure that artificially favors the Big Mac, french fries and soft drink? If it weren't for corn, soybean and wheat subsidies, fast food wouldn't be so cheap. Neither would any other processed food. Fresh, whole food would be price competitive with industrial food, particularly if we applied the grain subsidies to more wholesome foods. Grass-fed beef and dairy would cost the same as grain-fed. I'm no economist, so I don't know how realistic this really is. However, my central point still stands: we can change the incentive structure so that it no longer artificially favors industrial food. That will require that the American public get fed up and finally butt heads with special interest groups.