“This passes as fun for Quakers,” said Max Carter, director of Friends Center and campus ministry coordinator, as he introduced authors Joe and Terry Graedon. The Graedon’s are the ultimate power couple in the medical world. No wonder they were chosen to be the 2008 Distinguished Quaker guests. On Sept. 22, the audience at the New Garden Friends Meeting was captivated as the Graedons shared the history of their work, their thoughts on the future of medicine, several interesting anecdotes, a few remedies, and Grandma’s rules for good health.

Joe is a pharmacologist and Terry is a medical anthropologist. So, what does that mean? According to Terry, medical anthropologists “study people and are interested in their health.” They also are aware of “how people’s beliefs and behaviors affect their health.”

Joe worked at a neuropharmacology lab near Princeton during the Vietnam War and then went to grad school at Ann Arbor and that’s where he met Terry. In 1972, Joe taught second-year pharmacology in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Since most of the classes that Joe taught were in morning, he had time on his hands; he began thinking and writing about the myths of medicine. This led to the publication of Joe and Terry’s best-selling book “The People’s Pharmacy” in 1976.Since then, Joe and Terry have published 11 more books in “The People’s Pharmacy” series. About a year after the first book came out, Joe and Terry did an interview on NPR, which led to them beginning their own radio show on NPR in the early 1980s. The Graedons made a Web site a few years ago and it has become an online community where people share their problems, solutions, herbal remedies, medical woes, and more.

“We’ve not been working hard, we’ve been having fun,” said Terry Graedon. This is true because their research and work is fun for them; they enjoy helping people. Joe and Terry shared several of their homeopathic remedies for illnesses and ailments such as colds, arthritis, leg cramps, burns, cuts, and inflammatory bowels.

Some of the remedies they shared have been around for at least 60 years or more. An example of that would be a mustard plaster, a paste made of dry mustard powder, flour, and egg whites, thats remedies cold symptoms like congestion and cough.

“How many of the young ones here have had mustard plasters?” asked Joe and most of us looked at him with confusion.

“How many of them have been plastered?” asked Carter and the audience laughed.

Another home remedy that the Graedons have embraced is soy sauce to treat pain from burns. The remedy was discovered when Joe burnt himself on Thanksgiving when he forgot to put on oven mitts before taking the turkey out of the oven. He decided to try putting soy sauce on the burn. The pain was gone within two minutes of applying it.

However, the most surprising remedy was gin and raisins as a treatment for arthritis. Just soak raisins in a bowl of gin for about a week, and then eat nine raisins a day; they taste great on cereal.

“Some say gin and raisins don’t do a blessed thing, but they do taste good on oatmeal,” Joe said.

In terms of what remedies work or not, Terry said, “Won’t hurt, might help, and isn’t too expensive.”

After sharing a few more remedies, they talked about the future of medicine and the People’s Pharmacy.

“My crystal ball is not very good, so I can’t say what the future of medicine will be,” said Terry when a member of the audience asked what the future of medicine looked like.

“The goal is to create educated patients. That’s where The People’s Pharmacy is leading us – educating patients and creating a community,” Joe said.

When asked about the American Pharmaceutical industry, they had a few things to say.

“We have little to show in terms of medical advances, because there hasn’t been a real medical revolution since penicillin,” Joe said.

Both Joe and Terry are aware of the potential side effects that can occur when taking certain medicines.

“All drugs are going to have side-effects; it’s unrealistic to expect drugs to not have side effects,” Terry said.

Joe used to preach that generic drugs were just as effective as brand name drugs, but he became aware of an exception to that thought. In the case of Budeprion XL, the generic form of Wellbutrin XL, the generic form is not as effective and could actually be harmful to patients who switch from Wellbutrin to Budeprion XL.

For more information on the Graedons and their book, you can visit www.peoplespharmacy.com