Semester 4, Week 8, Day 2: Suffix Meanings

My face is swollen...  It turns out the rash I'm experiencing is truly contact dermatitis.  I had ruled it out because I hadn't touched anything meaning "contact" but my husband helped me narrow this down.  Though I have used cilantro for years in cooked salsa, I'm using it fresh in my dressing and quite a bit of it.  I'm allergic.  Who knew!  I've now changed the way I'm treating this. Of all the things I'm eating, this is the only one that could be the cause.  This does make me quite sad. Cilantro helps the body with detoxing which is why I wanted to use it. My concern now is am I allergic to the herbs I'm using to treat it?  I started treating it yesterday and my face is far worse today.  I made a topical cream this morning and it stung when I put it on but I'll use it today to see what happens. Glad I don't have any where to go today! 

I didn't get to what I wanted done yesterday so that's the agenda for today.  Once I get my assignments done, I can then focus on the herbariums so I can be ready to return to herbs once I'm done with the discussion posts.  I'm waiting to hear back from my capstone teacher on the rubric for the literature review.  I'm beginning to think doing a project for this class was a mistake because there are a lot of questions that remain unanswered and this stuff is due in 2 months.  I'm tempted to change my project to this site and just post my entry on the commercial side but we'll see what happens when she finally answers me. Love and Light!

On to the discussion!

"Functional groups and the etymology of herbal constituents: finding the hidden meaning in names.
The names of many phytochemicals contain hints about their organic structures. Can you find examples of names ending with –ol, –al, ­–one, –phenyl, –ane, –ene, –yne, and other word forms that we have discussed in this module? For example, menthol is an alcohol ending in –ol. What do these names tell us about the molecules?"
 
 
Finding names is the easy part because I have a list of constituents on my web site. Thanks to this lesson, I now understand them a bit more.  It was more extensive but my daughter deleted my entire site over the break and I didn’t have it backed up so I just have a partial list of what was there before and will reconstitute it as I learn this semester. -one is a common ending for molecules that are ketones. One I have listed on my blog is thujone. It is present in wormwood and can be toxic. Ketones are the precursors to compounds that can become fatty acids. They can be reduced to alcohols and forming ethers is common according to Heinrich et al. (2018, p. 66). Thujone is also in white cedar oil, tansy oil, sage, and rosemary according to Hoffman, 2003, p. 530.

The amine or amino group often ends in -ine. I have a few words with that ending in my constituent list. 2 related words are harmaline and harmine. The class lesson says this group can be quite polar. I thought it odd that alkaloids (these are both indole alkaloids) are listed in this group instead of the alkane group so I did a quick google search and a whole bunch of quizlet pages came up indicating they are. These 2 are on my list because they are in passionflower. They are in many more but in all the structures depicted here, to include harman, you can see the polarity where the molecules are being pushed down (Hoffman, 2004, p. 128) and these all seem to suppress something, generally with the nervous system so it’s like that polarity is pushing down the issues they are treating.

Chemistry was my bane in high school but I understand how critical it is in this field so I will try very hard to learn as much as I can here!
 
References
Heinrich, M., Barnes, J., Garcia, J. M. P., Gibbons, S., and Williamson, E. M. (2018). Fundamentals of Pharmacognosy and Phytotherapy. Elsevier.
Hoffman, David. (2003). Medical Herbalism: The Science and Practice of Herbal Medicine. Rochester, VT: Healing Arts Press.


Have a Great Day!