Colchicine
Colchicine is best known nowadays for its main use in medicine, as a drug prescribed for acute eruptions of gout and the hereditary Familial Mediterranean fever. It is actually a natural biological product which serves as a secondary metabolite to the plants from Colchicum genus, and once was being extracted from them. The best known source for it in wilderness is Colchicum autumnale.
Colchicum autumnale is a six petal flower very alike crocuses, for which it is usually best known as autumn crocus. The obvious difference between the two can be read in the name, C. autumnale flowers only in autumn (September-October), and one more distinctive feature is that the flower is the only thing left of it by then, leaves already long yellow and fallen to the ground, and that’s why it is sometimes also called “naked lady”.
Colchisine is actually a toxic substance, and the plants from the genus are all poisonous, and in old times it was often used for assassinations. The intoxication symptoms are very alike the arsenic poisoning: fever, abdominal pain, vomiting, diarrhea and in the end kidney failure and vascular damage, which leads to hypovolemic shock resulting in death if the proper treatment is not applied in 24 hours.
Despite being poisonous, its medical effects have been discovered long ago, and even around 1500 BC it was already used as a treatment for rheumatism. Colchicine being used as gout remedy traces back from 550 AD as a recommendation of a great Greek physician, Alexander of Tralles. Only in 1820 it was managed for the first time to separate it as an alkaloid and later to be proven as a tricyclic alkaloid, thus revealing that its property of binding with tubuline is the cause of the anti-inflammatory effect.
In modern pharmacology there are a few other uses of Colchicine besides the main two. Due to its anti-inflammatory effects, it is used in long-term Behcet’s disease treatments; an Australian pharmaceutical company uses colchicine together with olsalazine for irritable bowel syndrome treatments; a Britain pharmacy is trying to develop a prodrug from it in order to treat cancer and besides all these it is sometimes used for back pains.
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