Atovaquone and Berberine Chloride Reduce SARS-CoV-2 Replication In Vitro

Epidemic RNA viruses seem to arise year after year leading to countless infections and devastating disease. SARS-CoV-2 is the most recent of these viruses, but there will undoubtedly be more to come. While effective SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are being deployed, one approach that is still missing is effective antivirals that can be used at the onset of infections and therefore prevent pandemics. Here, we screened FDA-approved compounds against SARS-CoV-2. We found that atovaquone, a pyrimidine biosynthesis inhibitor, is able to reduce SARS-CoV-2 infection in human lung cells. In addition, we found that berberine chloride, a plant-based compound used in holistic medicine, was able to inhibit SARS-CoV-2 infection in cells through direct interaction with the virion. Taken together, these studies highlight potential avenues of antiviral development to block emerging viruses. Such proactive approaches, conducted well before the next pandemic, will be essential to have drugs ready for when the next emerging virus hits.

Legitimating New Religiosity in Contemporary Russia

Attitudes toward alternative spirituality in Russia are shaped by legislative limitations on religious freedom, the state’s traditionalism, and Russian Orthodox anticultism. Nevertheless, public personalities associated with new religious movements persist and flourish. Oleg Torsunov, popularizer of Vedic Psychology and holistic medicine, is a striking example. Despite ongoing controversies about his religious affiliation, medical claims, and gender ideology, Torsunov continues to attract followers. This article examines why public figures such as Torsunov seem unsinkable in hostile cultural environments. Mapping the heated discursive landscape surrounding Torsunov, I argue that the secret to this resilience is a “legitimation lattice”—the strategy of grounding one’s authority in several sources of legitimacy. Torsunov’s lattice is composed of different interlocked strips: science, Indian spirituality, personal charisma, and common stereotypes. This structure increases the resilience of controversial public figures in two ways: by making their legitimation strategies flexible and by allowing them to emphasize mainstream values as needed.

AIDS Without Metaphor: Sontag and Her Struggle With Disease

The article considers the demetaphorization strategy which Susan Sontag used in her essay AIDS and Its Metaphors. The program that Sontag put forward in Against Interpretation is readily applicable to diseases such as cancer or AIDS, which inevitably become entangled in metaphorical descriptions that encourage sermonizing and moralism. The modernist ideal of avoiding interpretation that Sontag proposed would enable thinking about a disease as a distinct etiological entity brought into sharp focus by the very process of stripping away its cloak of metaphorical layers, myths and imaginings. The article suggests that Sontag’s strategy, which is both practical and semiological, can be understood as a critique of the tradition of holistic medicine usually called “alternative” as well as a countermeasure to it. Medicine of that kind in the West harks back to ancient paradigms and in particular to Stoicism by presupposing that moral errors can be equated with diseases and sins with symptoms. Sontag believes that metaphors are not only useless but also harmful in that they impose a mistaken therapeutic program for both disease and patient, for example, by prescribing exercise or a healthy lifestyle when they are irrelevant. The article analyzes some problems in Sontag’s demetaphorization and argues in particular that the isolation and detection of a disease as such are not somehow antecedent to metaphor, even if the nature of the disease is well understood. Diseases whose nature or treatment are unknown, at least at a given point in history, are an additional problem. Sontag assumes a correlation between a disease as an isolated entity and a drug of choice or a precise therapeutic method, but that correlation cannot always be made.

Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy: Emerging of Science-Based Hypnosis

Hypnosis, which has been used for centuries in different forms, has to be reevaluated in the light of modern medicine and science by biological, psychological, sociological and spiritual approach. Hypnosis has been regaining its popularity in the trend of personalized and holistic medicine without any drug, injection or side effects.

Pharmacognostical And Pharmacological Activity of Punica Granatum (Pomegranate): An Overview

Punica granatum (PG) Linn (Family Punicaceae) is also known as pomegranate in English and commonly known as Anar in Hindi, it is found in the nearby region of Iran and very often found in the Himalayas and northern region of India and also cultivated since the ancient times, all over the region of Africa, Europe, and Asia. The various parts of pomegranate plants like seeds, leaf, root, and rind, in the traditional medicine system, used to treat multiple disease ailments such as wound healing, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, decreases cancer risks, anti-arthritic, anti-proliferative and many more diseases.Punica granatum Linn. f. has an excellent level of pharmacological action, which very important according to the medicinal point of view. An enormous variety of phytochemicals such as alkaloids, flavonoids, saponin, carbohydrates, steroids, triterpenoids, carotenoids, amino acids, tannins, phenolics, and coumarins. This plant (PG) is very rich in phenolic compounds, due to the presence of such a wide variety of phytoconstituents. The whole plant was extensively used during the holistic medicine system in the treatment of the number of disease treatment.This review mainly focused on the large variety of essential pharmacognostic and pharmacological profile that is necessary to exhibit the crucial therapeutic activity and phytopharmacological properties of different parts of Punica granatum.