A novel way of thinking about grapefruit juice

It's now common knowledge that one should stay away from grapefruit juice if taking certain medications like cholestrol-lowering statins. This is because compounds in the fruit inhibit a liver enzyme responsible for normal metabolism of these drugs. It thus slows the excretion of these drugs, which is dangeous if one is unaware of his drug levels and keeps ingesting the drug at his prescribe dosage, leading to overdose.

More details are given in this Wikipedia article, which come largely from a 1997 Journal of Clinical Investigation paper on how grapefruit juice slows down the breakdown of a calcium channel blocker.

So then, grapefruits slows down parts of the liver and thus prolongs the concentrations of some drugs in the bloodstream. Bad? Yes, for some people died because of the overdosing effect. But is there any good too?

Perhaps yes. Here's a short letter to the editor in the July 29th issue of Science News demonstrating some novel thinking on this matter:

It would seem to me that instead of looking to minimize the effect of grapefruit juice in slowing the metabolism and elimination of drugs, one could cut drug dosages by taking advantage of it ("Nabbed: Culprit of grapefruit juice-drug interaction," SN 5/20/06 p. 317). Grapefruit juice costs less than any drug and has far fewer side effects. This could only benefit the patient by lowering drug exposure and costs.

Pretty neat idea, using something that affects physiology in a seemingly adverse way to improve health instead but with an economic benefit.

The idea is untested of course, and as an UNC researcher points out in his rebuttal, nobody knows how grapefruit juice exactly affects metabolism, or what dosages would be effective and safe. Still, kudos to the letter writer for being creative in the realm of medicine. Creativity is about roaming into the unknown, unconstrained by conventional views and even logic sometimes, which is what the writer did.