"Beverly Erlebacher" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
"]news:[email hidden]...
Quoted message said:Tools is being particularly stupid here because coumadin
is a coumarin,
Quoted message said:and coumarins are vitamin K antagonist anticoagulants
found naturally
Quoted message said:in stressed sweet clover. They were discovered when dairy
farmers
Quoted message said:asked the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) to
fund research
Quoted message said:into why their cattle died from internal bleeding after
grazing on
Quoted message said:frost-burned or drought-stressed forage. The first use
for this was
Quoted message said:the rat poison warfarin (note the name) which takes long
enouhg to kill
Quoted message said:the rat that it doesn't make the connection between its
illness and the
Quoted message said:bait. Later, the medical use was developed. So just like
digitalis,
Quoted message said:it's a botanical drug too dangerous to be used without the
kind of
Quoted message said:carefully managed dosing that can only be achieved with a
purified
Quoted message said:form, since the content of the plants varies much too
widely.
COMMENT:
Like all good stories the really correct version is not quite as perfect as you relate, but almost.
Here's my chance to take erudide revenge over your Canadian quibble.
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation WARF did fund the original sweet clover research. But
clover don't make the active bishydroxycoumarin due to stress-- it's a fungal product formed from
plant coumarin in wet clover cut in the fields, perhaps made by fungi as a poison, not wanting to be
eaten. Coumarin from the plant itself (and what you get in normal herbal red clover) is a lovely
compound, non-toxic, and with odor of newly cut grass. It may yet some clinical uses, but isn't an
anticoagulant.
Bishydroxycoumarin, the same stuff from spoiled sweet clover, was used under the tradename
Dicoumarol in medicine as an anticoagulalant in the 1940's. There is great confusion between
Dicoumarol and Coumadin, the drug which eventually replaced it, starting 1954. (I don't even think
you can get medical Dicoumarol in the US anymore, though probably you can in Europe.)
Coumadin is indeed Warfarin, the old rat poison of the 1950's, and named for WARF and Coumarin. It's
a synthetic easier to make and longer-acting derivative of bishydroxycoumarin, in which one coumarin
moiety is replaced by a phenyl group. It may work partly because rats don't associate it with
immediate illness, as you say, but probably the more important thing is that bleeding rats get
thirsty and go outside to drink, where they die instead of in your walls or attic.
A famous attempted suicide case in the early 1950's in which a sailor attempted to kill himself with
Warfarin containing rat poison (duh, a sort of poison that wouldn't work as well on ships, but tell
that to the Navy) was saved with vitamin K and transfusions. This brought Warfarin to the attention
of the medical community as a more powerful and easier to dose Dicoumarol replacement that could be
reversed if necessary, and Coumadin was born.
Sweet clover herbal products are certainly not made from extract of fungally spoiled sweet clover.
They have plant coumarins, but no significant Dicoumarol/bishydroxycoumarin, and are not
anticoagulants. The presence of plant coumarins has led to many [censored] on both sides of the herb
issue either warning about clover interacting with anticoagulants (they don't) or advocating (as the
[censored] on this forum) clover being used as anticoagulants (they don't do that either). Plant coumarins
are at worst harmless, and at best might have beneficial effects on certain inflammatory processes
in the body. But that's another topic.
SBH
