Month: January 2019

I am working on a new book on Chinese herbal remedies based on those reported in my Newsletter (now republished together with my memoir in a single volume titled My Life & Rollercoaster Career), as described in another post on this blog.  Most of the remedies/recipes are translated from published Chinese journals or magazines.  Only a handful are from my grandma.   

Here is one among these, previously published in the journal, Xinzhongyi, meaning ‘New Chinese Medicine.’  But I doubt it has been translated, abstracted, or entered into any databases, even those in Chinese.  The reason is Chinese scientists have been so indoctrinated by Big Pharma over the past decades that this kind of reports might be viewed as ‘non-scientific’ and ignored.  If any discerning Chinese colleagues with access to this journal in print and see it entered into any database, please correct me.

This report is so amazingly simple and effective that I couldn’t help reporting it back in April/May, 1988, in its Issue #7 (see p. 246 of my above dual book).  It certainly won’t hurt for childless couples to give it a try, especially now goji is available in many American chain groceries, such as Whole Foods and Sprouts.  And there is no toxic drug either!

Lycium fruit in the treatment of male sterility [Xinzhongyi, 20(2): 20 (1988)].  This is such a simple and safe treatment that it is rather unbelievable!  One simply chew and swallow 15 g of lycium fruit every night for 1 to 3 months and abstain from sex during this time (This may be the clincher!).  The authors report treating 42 patients with this condition.  Forty patients ranged in age from 20 to 30 years and 2 were over 30.  Nine patients had been married for 2-3 years, 24 married for 3-5 years and 9 married for 5-10 years without offspring.  Evaluation of sperm count and motility revealed abnormally low count in all patients, with 6 having zero count; and sperm motility was generally weak.  After 1 mo of treatment, sperm count returned to normal in 23 patients.  After 2 mo of treatment, the sperm count of 10 patients also normalized.  Among the remaining 9 patients who didn’t respond to treatment, 6 had zero sperm count at the onset of treatment.  A 2-year follow-up on the 33 patients with normalized sperm count revealed that they all produced offspring.

            Lycium fruit has been used as a food and medicine in China for many centuries.  It has a pleasant and sweetish taste, slightly resembling that of raisins, and is readily available in Chinese food stores and herb shops.  It is one of my favorite food herbs.  A great yin tonic, good for people with excessive yang who tend to be on overdrive and constipated.  Its various good properties have been described in previous issues of this newsletter. 

Compared to some of the remedies for impotence and sterility that I have seen (which often are so complicated and tortuous that it boggles the mind to think that some men actually go through with them), the above treatments are certainly much simpler and less dangerous! 

20190120

Chinese healthcare products maker Quanjian under investigation over girl’s death in 2015

From South China Morning Post, Dec 28, 2018.

What Quanjian has done really hits home for me.   It sets back my efforts in trying to modernize and legitimize Chinese medicine in world health care for who knows how long.  I published my 2 recent books only months ago, which finally put my life, thoughts, and accomplishments on record.  And only weeks ago, I started blogging in earnest.  My ideas on modern drugs and herbal supplements are not ordinary; they are disruptive.  They can radically change health care for the general population.  Instead of the current modern, but expensive, toxic drug therapy for just the privileged few, a new class of tried-and-true natural therapeutics, derived from millennia of human experience, can be provided to the general population at affordable cost.  They will financially impact the drug developers, makers, sellers, prescribers, and users of conventional drugs.  And the dietary (herbal) supplement industry will have to undergo a readjustment before starting to provide affordable natural therapeutics to an increasing population as a true alternative to current toxic drugs.

This news about Quanjian’s providing ‘ancient’ or ‘secret’ Chinese cures for treating cancer reinforces the negative (‘charlatan’) image of Chinese medicine in peoples around the world who don’t know about it or have never experienced its beneficial effects.  Because of this, it’s much more difficult for me now to explain how drugs and traditional medicines work in our body, irrespective of how and from where they originate.  And this is just the scientific and traditional part.  The other, and more difficult part is how to change greed in those who constitute a small minority of our population yet holds the money and power to maintain the vicious cycle that negatively affects the rest of us.  But it is a self-generating, perpetual money-machine for this minority.  Regardless, I still believe in the decency in the majority of our population.  I believe the only way to counter greed is to remove the money incentives for drug makers and their interdependent associates by breaking the vicious cycle.  For that, we need to enlist the consumers and honest politicians.

In my last post, I urged herbalists and herbal scientists to come together.  I hope you have listened to my call.  I have plans to start first with the identity and quality of true herbal supplements, which I have advocated for decades.  I need your help to spread the word together with me.  There are already interested like-minded parties willing to work with me, not to exploit our healthcare system, but to give fellow consumers an affordable alternative.

20190111

To all herbalists and herbal scientists!!
We must join forces to prevent this from happening!

A colleague and friend, Roy Upton, recently sent me a chapter he had written for a book titled, “Evidence-Based Validation of Herbal Medicine” published by Elsevier Inc. in 2015. It is Chapter 3, Traditional Herbal Medicine, Pharmacognosy, and Pharmacopoeial Standards: A Discussion at the Crossroads. That is a detailed account of a historical look at the diverse field of pharmacognosy. If you have time and patience, I recommend it, though I can’t guarantee that you would get a clear idea of what pharmacognosy actually is, after reading it.
I have tried my best to explain “pharmacognosy” in the Preface of my Memoir and in pp. 428-431 under “Pharmacognosy Revisited” of my dual book, “My Life & Rollercoaster Career.” But the subject is so broad and complex that it is not easy to narrow it down to a single word or phrase. From both Roy’s and my attempts to describe it, I have come to the conclusion that, after millennia of evolution from traditional herbal medicine to the science of pharmacognosy (broadly, the study of natural drugs) and with a heavy dose of drug influence, pharmacognosy in the West is now nothing but drug discovery and development. Decades of my personal training and experience in traditional Chinese medicine, along with Roy’s description of how pharmacopoeial standards evolved over time, have led me to the following realization of the plight of herbal medicine:

1. Despite the detailed pharmacopoeial standards set for raw herbs, from the originally basic organoleptic (e.g., morphologic & sensory), microscopic, simple physicochemical testing, to the more advanced, genetic, and finally, precise chemical requirements, the last (i.e., chemical) alone has triggered the demise of herbal medicine. Under current ‘modern’ herbal practice, once a so-called active chemical, among countless others, is identified in an herb and assigned to be its marker of identity and quality, you don’t need any of the other non-chemical standards anymore, unless your final product is a formula of raw powdered herbs. This has been the industry practice for at least 20 years.
2. With the above rationale, most commercial herbal products/supplements are probably standardized to a particular chemical marker, but contain no herbal elements. This is because, as far as I know, there are still no standards for finished commercial herbal supplements, despite the existence of copious nonchemical pharmacopoeial standards for the raw herb ingredients.
3. The main reason we are in our current status quo is that, as scientific herbal experts, we have been confused since day one after the passage of DSHEA in 1994. We regulate herbs as food, yet we continue to analyze them as drugs, using the wrong drug-oriented technology and expect the results to meet drug standards. Obviously, this would not happen as it is no different than analyzing chlorogenic acid in echinacea or in coffee, and call that chemical echinacea or coffee. Because of this scenario, traditional herbs have never been properly studied or their therapeutic values validated. Most, if not all, such studies have used the wrong pharmaceutical approach specifically designed and established for simple chemical drugs, which is not suitable for complex herbs and foods.

In the quality control of drugs, we need standards, such as pure aspirin in aspirin work; and not just another painkiller like morphine. But with complex, multichemical herbs, there are no simple standards for them. Most herb standards (aka reference materials) are based on some specific chemical(s) in the herbs, assumed to represent the herbs. They are not true standards, only based on assumption or wishful thinking, which is neither science nor tradition. At the present time, the closest to true herbal standards is the Representative Botanical Reference Material (RBRM) of our Phyto-True system (see an earlier post). With this RBRM, appropriate results from herbal research or analysis can now be achievable. The P-T system was developed as a byproduct of a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant of $1.4 million awarded to my company, Phyto-Technologies, Inc., in 2001 by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Health (NCCAM), NIH. And its RBRM was recently granted a European patent.

Posted January 6, 2019