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!
20181231