Month: December 2018

Synthetic Drugs versus Traditional Herbal Medicines

 Two Different Systems of Therapy

 

In recent years we hear so much about evidence-based medicine?  What is it?  Does it mean scientific?  Or is it accumulated Grandmas’ wisdom?

First of all, with chemical drugs that are easily identifiable and quantifiable such as aspirin and morphine, their development and production may be scientific.  However, once they enter a complex multi-cellular organism like our body, this therapeutic process can hardly be considered scientific.  We may use scientific technologies to control and analyze the drugs (their purity, dosage, and methods of administration, etc.) but we can’t control our body by telling its millions of chemicals and cells to step aside when the drugs enter it, so that they can go directly to their presumed targets (receptors, enzymes, or other living matters) to do their magic.  Without precise guidance, these drugs are bound to bump into many of the living matters in our highly organized and extremely well-functioning body to cause havoc.  This process is simply trial and error, not scientific.  And it hasn’t changed since our ancestors started treating our illnesses with herbs, minerals, or animal products millennia ago.  When one herb (or drug) does not work, try another.  That is pretty much it.  How scientific can that be?  It’s the skill, compassion, and experience of the healer more than anything else, as always, since the beginning of human existence.  Hence, for centuries, the practice of medicine has been invariably considered an art.  Or could evidence-based medicine also mean to include historical experience of traditional herbal medicine in addition to the modern treatment with toxic drugs?

Actually, the difference between modern synthetic drugs and natural medicines (e. g., herbs) definitely has played a crucial role since the modern drug era started 200-300 years ago.   Natural medicines are taken from our environment and sooner or later will return to it.  This has been going on since antiquity.  If they don’t work, they cause us no harm.  Nor would they seriously damage our environment.   On the other hand, with synthetic drugs, it’s another story.  They are mostly toxic because these chemicals are brand new to our environment and have never before interacted with us on our planet, despite the fact that one of its major raw material sources is petroleum.  Though we have never ingested it to have lived to tell our experience.  Whatever we tried to do with herbs eons ago when our ancestors started to develop our systems of traditional medicines by trial and error are now deemed non-scientific by many, if not most, scientists.   Regardless, by now we have already accumulated millennia of experience, knowledge, and wisdom on these medicines.  And we know what are safe and what are not.  In contrast, modern drug therapy has no more than 300 years or so of accumulated experience.  Even after a drug has successfully passed clinical trials, it still always has side-effects many of which are toxic, because it may also contain impurities due to intermediates and byproducts resulting from the synthetic process, which cannot be completely removed.   The traditional wisdom among chemists and scientists has always been that synthetic and natural chemicals are the same because they have the same chemical structure whether they are synthetic or derived from nature, as long as they are both pure.  Yet we have never bothered to take these impurities seriously.  We set limits for them.  But as far as I can tell, during my long years being educated in drugs and natural chemicals, as well as my years involved in these fields as a professional, we seemed never to have bothered to test specifically for the toxicities of these impurities.  When you scan the United States Pharmacopeia (U.S.P., our official book on drug standards) you will find there is always a small to sizable percentage of impurities allowed in the drugs.   The range of these impurities span from around 2% to 10%, or more, with natural drugs (chemicals) being allowed the higher limits.  It seems whoever set these limits of impurities already had an implicit understanding that the impurities in natural medicines are less toxic than those accompanying synthetic drugs, hence our body can tolerate more of them, whatever they are.  Because of these synthetic drugs being brand new, along with their equally brand-new impurities, our body’s experience would take probably centuries or millennia before it would get used to them, just as it had gotten used to the natural substances, including natural chemicals, before we finally have come to know the nature of some of them to consider them now safe and effective.  Consequently, this modern scenario is not unlike the progression of the development of traditional herbal medicines – trial and error over time, until we can determine which works or is not toxic, and which kills.

Can anyone, especially those involved in the original coining of the phrase “evidence-based medicine,” tell us, in understandable language, what it actually means, now that I have given my ‘simple-minded’ arguments?  If you read my earlier posts and my newest dual book, you may agree with me.  Like me, you may also have been trained in college and graduate/medical school the Big-Pharma way and may not realize there is another true therapy option, which you may have already dismissed as not scientific or evidence-based.  Until 15 to 20 years ago, I was like you, always thinking the same way – active principles.  Only my Chinese medicine upbringing since childhood finally made me realize the problem.  Chemical drugs and multi-chemical herbs cannot be treated the same way.  The technology established specifically for analyzing simple drugs cannot be applied to complex herbs to produce consistent and meaningful results that we expect.  It is not unlike trying to analyze pectin (one of the countless chemicals present in apple) and call that chemical, apple; or chlorogenic acid in echinacea and call that chemical, echinacea.  Wouldn’t you brand that process ‘pseudoscience,’ as many of us call herbal medicine?

Thank you all!  Watch for my next 2 posts. One is on the imminent demise of traditional herbal medicine, unless…  The other is for producers and/or marketers of genuine cannabidiol, CBD, on how to be leaders in the crowded field of this lucrative business by showing your products’ unique fingerprints, not just hype.

As this subject is not trivial, to avoid mutual embarrassment, please send serious comments to my personal email:  ayl@earthpower.com

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

 

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I use the computer but I am not savvy with its inner workings.  Just a couple of weeks ago, I was trying to access my blog and discovered that when I typed www.ayslcorp.com/blog on Google Bing, it didn’t lead me to my blog.  Instead, I was directed to TheScientist website www.the-scientist.com featuring an article “Biotechnology Turns To Ancient Remedies In Quest For Sources Of New Therapies” in its January 6, 1997 issue.

It is 9 pages long, printed.  In this article, I was quoted in the last 3 pages, so were some prominent scientists and colleagues that I know, throughout the piece.  They include Michael Balick, Eric Larson, Paul Gross, Steven King, Freddie Ann Hoffman, John Babish, and Sylvia Lee-Huang along with a few other Chinese scientists not within my area of expertise, whom I don’t know.

That reminds me of Mike Balick and me being suckered into a charity event in New York that turned out to be a scam organized by a Korean woman along with a fairly well-known TV personality (a male reporter) around New York.  There were 2 expert speakers at the event.  Mike and I.  I had only agreed to particulate when I saw Mike’s name on the program and volunteered my time as did Mike who also saw my name. I don’t remember the details except it was on a yacht moored on the East River. There were maybe a dozen people.  Mike and I met and we were chagrined.  Then it rained cats and dogs, and I stayed briefly and left. Probably Mike did too.  That was probably between 20 and 30 years ago.  It could be the last time we saw each other.

 

Anyway, this article was published almost 20 years ago.  But the following key elements in the standard drug discovery process from natural sources haven’t changed:

 

1. It is still only focusing on active chemicals and their precise identification and characterization.
2. Most scientists still view herbal medicines only as 1 or 2 of the many chemical(s) they contain or those isolated from them.
3. The primary incentive continues to be greed, making as much money as possible from patented chemicals, totally ignoring non-patentable herbal therapeutics or other affordable, easy-to-make therapies to afford our rapidly-expanding, financially-struggling fellow Americans. What has happened to our democracy, family values, and compassion for your neighbors?  The exploitation of American consumers by the drug industry and its interdependent associates has already firmly established itself in our society with its perpetual money-making machine that I call the vicious cycle of toxic drugs.   The more toxic drugs this consortium produces, the more side effects and diseases they generate, which, in turn, need to be treated with more drugs, in perpetuity, and with total impunity for the drug consortium.  I have described this vicious cycle extensively in my memoir (visit my blog www.ayslcorp.com/blog for more information).  This vicious cycle is real, yet most Americans seem to have no clue about it.  The drug consortium and a minor indebted, moneyed class are not going to do anything about it.  It’s up to us the non-privileged public to start from the bottom up.

 

What is not discussed is the myth that Chinese medicine (CM) is not scientific but modern drug therapy is.  How so?  Just consider a chemical drug or an herb entering our body consisting of a myriad of chemicals and cells.  It is supposed to go to certain enzyme, receptor or whatever, to block it from functioning certain ways so as to resolve the problem.  How would it get there with all these billions of chemicals and cells in its path without precise guidance?  Wouldn’t it bump into at least some of them and disturb our body’s extremely organized and well-functioning, balanced state, which would cause chaos, hence side effects?  That process (more like gambling) certainly doesn’t seem scientific to me whether the ‘hero’ is a drug or an herb!

 

All the scientists quoted were either brainwashed by Big Pharma or had no insight into Chinese medicine, still persistently seeking active principles (simple chemicals) and wondering how, or oblivious to how, to solve the complex multichemical-herbs problem.  Thus, over the past 20 plus years, the search for new drugs have not changed.  It is still chemicals and more chemicals.

However, a quote from Mike Balick caught my attention when he describes CM versus other traditional herbal systems, “… It’s written down, taught in medical schools, and has been refined and developed over thousands of years.  It’s a living, vibrant system compared with other traditional systems around the world that are in danger of dying out.” Mike is basically correct, except he seemed to be unaware that the CM had been heading towards the same fate.  I have extensively explained this in my recent books and I am actively trying to let the world know about it.  And that’s why I will continue to blog about this, as long as possible.

 

After all these years when I rediscovered this article and read my own comments quoted by the author, Alison Mack, I feel right at home.  Here they are:

 

“It’s very easy to take a Chinese herb with multiple functions, go after a single active chemical and forget about the total picture,” observed pharmacognosist Albert Leung … “The real challenge,” Leung says, “is to take traditional herbs used for specific purposes and discover how they work.”  That’s a difficult proposition, because “modern science can’t handle multiple effects,” he explains. “Well-known, useful herbs never get a complete study, because [Western scientists] behave like the blind men examining the elephant.  They can only describe the trunk, the ear, the tail – they never understand the whole animal.” 

           Rather than attempt to describe every active chemical present in a Chinese herbal prescription, as well as their interactions, Leung and others advocate evaluating such complex formulas as a whole…

           Leung describes the situation more vividly, “It’s a mess, a real Wild West.  There are no regulations [governing the composition of herbal supplements].”  Some unscrupulous manufacturers, he says, “are making millions selling water and hydrolyzed starch.”

 

Actually, I had totally forgotten about this article.  That was at an era when the Office of Alternative Medicine still existed.  Because of my background and experience, I was selected as its prime reviewer of proposals for its first or second round of research funding and I was given 6 proposals to review.  Out of these six I reviewed, 2 or 3 that I recommended for funding, were funded.  Other than that, I don’t remember much about my interactions with the government at that time.  If you read my memoir, you’d see my history of interacting with our government, especially NIH, NCI, NCCAM, and my experience with federal contracts and grants.  As in scientific research, all I can say is that too much politics is present, and it seems whoever speaks the loudest has the ‘truth.’

 

Regardless, since this article appeared 20 years ago, the drug industry has increasingly controlled our drug development and production processes and thus undeservedly receiving a large, if not the largest single, chunk of our government’s spending in health care.  Looking back, nothing has changed after all these years.  Traditional Chinese medicines (CM) have still not been properly investigated; we are only looking for specific chemicals in them or from them.  Greed still dominates the drug and herbal industries.  However, what I said (as quoted in the article) is still true.  All these years, even though I have never had any career plans, I somehow have accomplished what I had originally set out to do, which is to introduce CM to modern health care alongside ‘modern’ drug therapy.   When I read my own comments, I easily recognize my frank and sometimes tactless style of writing and speech which has offended some people and even colleagues and friends.  I finally realized that.  Which is why I have written my memoir to let others know of my communication handicap, not known to even some close friends, as a form of apology.  At the same time, I have also documented my new discoveries regarding CM that can now be truly modernized to serve side by side conventional drug therapy, making use of our Phyto-True system, whose RBRM (an herbal standard) was recently granted a European patent.  Although I no longer have my competent staff nor have I a publicity agent, at my advance age, I am starting to blog in earnest.  Sooner or later, my message for safer and modernized tried-and-true natural medicines will get noticed.

The last time I checked, maybe 15 years ago, 80% or more of the world’s population still relied on old fashion traditional medicines.  With this newly patented technology, it opens up new opportunities for truly modernized CM for world health care.  But I don’t want these to be turned into consumer-gouging enterprises controlled by a few moneyed businessman as with modern drugs.  Which is why I hope some unindebted health organizations, institutes, or governments would pick up the baton.  I can email you a copy of the general prospectus.  If interested, please clearly identify your organization in your request.  I would be especially interested in receiving requests from nonprofit organizations.  Or from individuals with social-media business expertise who believe in fairness in business and not just in maximizing profits at all costs, without compassion for the less fortunate.  I am ready to offer my expertise free of charge as long as it is not used to exploit others.

A.Y. Leung

Si ustedes se sienten más cómodos escribiendo en español por favor háganlo.  Yo puedo leerlo.   Gracias!

A.Y.  Leung (Alberto)