Month: April 2019

The three key elements of therapy

Now, let us talk therapy.  We have to bring the three together.  But before we do so, I want to clarify something.  The reason I have been talking about 3 elements, namely herbs, drugs and our body is because the important therapeutics I want to stress are herbs and drugs.  Herb therapy will automatically include food (diet) therapy and aromatherapy, possibly others.  Hence, therapy basically needs only 2 elements to complete – the therapeutic entity (i.e., drug, herb or food) and our body. 

            Since drugs and herbs are the most important healing agents, they get equal attention.  Though in the short period of measly 200 years, drugs have overshadowed most traditional herbs that have a minimum of at least several thousands of years of tried-and-true human-use experience.  My disruptive concept is based on their distinct differences between themselves and their different interactions with our body.  Understanding the subtleties between the 2 types of therapeutics and their different interactions (drugs vs. herbs & drugs/herbs vs. our body) will start to save lives and reduce human suffering as well as reduce overall costs of health care for us all.  Remember, the scientific experience we humans have with drugs is no more than 10 to 20 years of clinical trials, before they are released to (approved for) the general population.  Only then, the drugs begin to get tested for real by trial and error, no different from when herbs (foods) were tested at the dawn of human history, also by trial and error.  

1. The drugs.  The pharmaceutical and associated industries have made tremendous scientific advances in developing and producing drugs.  These advances move so fast that I can’t keep up nor can I understand the overall rationale behind them.  What I know for sure is that no matter what, they are finally all synthesized, except for maybe a handful.   And they, too, all have to enter our body to complete the process of therapy, as there is no e-therapy (as with e-books) at the present.  Furthermore, the drugs are not equipped with homing devices, as far as I know, to zero in on the assumed target(s) that cause the trouble and neutralize them to resolve our illness.  Once they are in our body, it is simply trial-and-error medicine as practiced over millennia by traditional healers based on their individual skills.  That is art and not science.  Researching, developing, and manufacturing drugs are highly scientific.  But drug therapy is hardly scientific.  It is not much different from the old-fashion practice of healing arts.  This is my assessment of modern drug therapy.  It can definitely use a dose of traditional herbs. 

            For example, antiviral or anticancer drugs can kill viruses or cancer cells, but they usually are so toxic (due to our complex body) they can kill the patients as well.  At the least, they would so weaken the patients’ immune system that the patients would eventually die because of it.  The Chinese have been successfully using tonic formulas to complement chemotherapy for several decades.  But here, we, as scientists, sneer at herbal formulas as unscientific, and feel compelled to modify them into chemically analyzable concoctions that usually no longer have their traditional tonic elements, hence their traditional properties.  This has been a decades-old issue so far unresolved, due to the misapplication of drug technologies to complex herbs, leading to wrong or irreproducible results, thus invalidating much of the research in drug therapy that has involved herbs.  However, with the RBRM from our Phyto-True system as the herb reference materials, the problem of over precision in herbal materials can be resolved, allowing the reproducibility of traditional well-documented herbal formulas to be scientifically prepared and used for the first time alongside drug therapy.  To my highly scientific American drug colleagues:  If you have a better and less toxic alternative that does not involve mere specific chemicals, I’d love to hear it.  For your information, our RBRM was discussed in an earlier post on my blog (www.ayslcorp.com/blog) and elsewhere in my recent books and other publications at the end of this paper “A Disruptive Concept in Drug Therapy.”

            I’ll treat the other therapeutic(s) in my 4^th post, coming soon.

Any Therapy Must Involve Our Body

Otherwise, there is no therapy.  Just potential toxic drugs, age-old herbs and foods (often also part of therapy) by themselves without our body don’t constitute therapy.  Depending on our beliefs, our body is given by God, or it has been evolved through gazillion years from chemicals to groups of them, to living cells, moving organisms, and eventually to us, before we were aware of our human existence millennia to millions of years ago.  Regardless, our body is extremely complex, with billions of living cells as well as chemicals, enclosed in a unit with distinctly unique but different interconnected parts functioning individually, and in concert, with amazing efficiency.  Furthermore, no two of these units or our bodies are exactly alike.  Any part of our body out of harmony would reverberate throughout the whole unit. 

            During the last 2 centuries, many Nobel prizes have been awarded to scientists who studied minuscule parts of our body, trying to figure out how it works and how to treat diseases.  Up to the present, have we solved our body’s mysteries?  Or have we eliminated diseases?  The answer is no.  Instead, only recently had we started the first of many drug-caused new diseases, such as Tardive Dyskinesia described in the last post?  God, for his/her/its creating us, has not received any Nobel prize.  Nor has father/mother Time that has gotten us to our current state of human existence, been thus honored.  It’s obvious that this prize only honors the world’s scientists with the most important accomplishments.   However, few of the humans belonging to a club of brilliant people and the moneyed class honoring them seem to see the wonders all around us.  If they did, they would have seen their extraordinary accomplishments (the best of human intelligence) easily dwarfed by these wonders, including our body. 

            Our body’s existence and how it works is still a mystery, just like the universe and the cosmos.  The scientific work done in a minute segment of our body, no matter how brilliant, is nothing compared to the whole body’s billions of similar minute segments, coordinated by some force to function as a whole in harmony.   Fixing it has been a centuries-long challenge.  It is easier to build a robot for a specific job and fix it when any of its parts breaks down than to tamper with our body trying to deal with a disfunction or a disease in it.

            Because of our body’s infinite complexity, a disturbance in any small segment is most likely to reverberate throughout the body.  Here are two of my main thoughts regarding therapy.

1. Traditional herbal medicines are no different than foods.  They are what they are, as a result of trial and error over time.  During this time (thousands or millions of years), through actual human experience, we have learned which herb is safe, which is toxic, and what we can do to make some toxic ones safer or less toxic.  The key element involved is time.  They are all based on actual human experience, and we already know most of them are safe and effective, based on at least 3500 years of continuous documentation (at least for Chinese herbs and formulas).
2. Modern synthetic drugs are based on artificially designed ‘scientific’ experimentation, not actual human experience.   Since synthetic chemicals are brand new to our planet and to us, we have never had experience with them.   We have no idea how edible or toxic they are.   Just like if we don’t know a mushroom, we won’t simply pick any mushroom and eat it.  We leave it alone until we can find someone experienced with mushrooms to tell us.  Since we can’t just ask anyone whether a newly synthesized chemical is safe, we design some elaborate scientific tests to find out.  So we test them in the test tube (in vitro), living matters (in vivo), via small animals, and finally in clinical trials in humans for 10 to 20 years before they are approved for human use, despite their always being accompanied by ‘tolerable’ side-effects during these periods.  However, the real test by trial and error only starts then, after being put into actual human use.  Though time has not been on modern synthetic drugs’ side.  These modern new drugs have no long human-use history as opposed to traditional herbal medicines whose safety or toxicity has been continuously tested in humans for as long as millennia and centuries (all documented) or many decades more than just 20 years during modern clinical trials for synthetic drugs.

As a scientist knowledgeable in the big picture of drugs and herbs used in human therapy, I simply don’t understand why some fellow scientists can’t see the difference between time-tested herbs (no different than foods) and synthetic chemicals (mostly made from reactions with or among new petrochemicals).  Unless, of course, if they are part of the consortium of drug makers, sellers, and their interdependent associates who control the vicious cycle.  Then, they have no choice but to defend their self-generating money-making machine whether or not the drugs they produce work or continue to cause more diseases, which is more to their own benefit. 

            In my next post, I’ll discuss the three elements of therapy.

For over 40 years of working in the herbal field, I have been vocal when it comes to disseminating scientific information on herbs and in herb research.  Also, I have been advocating identity and quality of herbal products during most of my professional career. My often frank and nonpolitical style might have offended some colleagues and friends.  I have already offered my apologies in my memoir.  But here again, my apologies

The rationale behind my arriving at “A DISRUPTIVE CONCEPT IN DRUG THERAPY” – 1^st post  

Background

After ephedrine and morphine were first isolated from the opium poppy and ephedra, circa 1887 and 1805 respectively, the focus on herbs have since been shifted to some of their contained chemicals.  That period is what I see as the transition point of age-old herbs to new chemical drugs.  Or in scientific jargon, from pharmacognosy (materia medica) to phytochemistry and related fields, with the eventual goal of obtaining from them only chemicals (drugs), not traditional herbal therapeutics.

            We firmly believe the chemicals to be the herbs’ active principles and talking about them as if we are certain they represent the herbs’ traditional properties and functions.  With this new scientific rationale, who needs the archaic, nonscientific herbs?  However, with some hedging, we also have included some nonchemical features in the herbs so as to ‘guarantee’ the modern herbal medicines to have some traditional properties as well.  But would these herb features transfer to the chemical drugs?  The answer is no.   But then, would they transfer to the finished herbal medicines/supplements?  The answer is maybe.

            We were (still are) confused.  The almost century-long transition period (1805-1887) firmly established the beginning of the drug era that has finally led to the self-generating money machine (vicious cycle) that I have described throughout my books, my blog (www.ayslcorp.com/blog) and other e-publications.  I believe that vicious cycle was officially sanctioned on April 11, 2017, by our FDA’s approval of the new drug, Valbenazine, for treating a drug-induced disease, Tardive Dyskinesia (or involuntary body movements), caused by the toxic side effects of common antipsychotic, antiepileptic, and gastrointestinal drugs.  To me, it means now we have a closed, self-perpetuating system in which you can produce more toxic drugs, whether or not they actually work, for a particular illness/disease, which cause more new diseases that in turn, require more drugs to treat, in a perpetual toxic cycle that is controlled by people who make and sell the drugs.  This is a monopoly of which our government seems to have no control and we, as citizens/consumers, have to grin and bear it.   Have I described the scenario correctly?  If not, please let me know.

            The confusion between the following 2 facts has caused our current problems with drugs and herbs.

1. Aspirin is aspirin and not another painkiller like Tylenol or morphine.
2. Herbs are naturally derived medicines not too different from foods (including supplements). They are all complex natural materials. They contain not just one or two chemicals, but many, actually countless. Among the countless chemicals present in them, the majority are unknown and unidentified. Therefore, no one single chemical in these natural herbs and foods can claim to hold their properties and attributes as known and documented through millennia, which is how we know the foods we eat and the herbs we ingest.

Although we identify and assess aspirin by chemical analyses, we can’t identify food and herbs simply by their contained chemicals such as pectin or ascorbic acid in apple and call either chemical ‘apple,’ nor can we analyze ginseng’s ginsenosides among many other chemicals also present (e.g., sterols, choline & oleanolic acid) and call any one particular chemical or group of chemicals ‘ginseng.’  Yet we have been doing just that for the past many decades.

              This seems to have quietly surfaced, but unresolved, over the recent 25 years after the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, DSHEA, was passed in 1994.  We regulate herbal supplements as food but from day one we treated (tested) them as drugs, requiring them to meet some chemical standards.  This obviously hasn’t worked, because we can’t simply select any chemical in an herb and call that chemical the herb, such as calling chlorogenic acid in echinacea, ‘echinacea,’ or pectin in apple, ‘apple.’  But that is exactly what we have been trying to do, without getting the expected results.  We seemed not to have grasped the fact that drugs and herbs are very different and continue to mix up the two.  Thus, with drugs, we use an aspirin standard for the identification, quality control, and manufacture of aspirin, but not for another painkiller like morphine.  Yet, for lack of any appropriate herbal standards, we have basically been using ambiguous and inappropriate herb standards (based on some chemical out of possibly hundreds or thousands others also present) and try to apply drug technology on herbs.  It is analogous to using an aspirin standard for any painkiller (aspirin, acetaminophen, or morphine).  This is not going to happen, as scientific technologies for drugs are well established.  We know this doesn’t work.  Any scientist knows that.  But scientists working on herbs often view herb standards (we call them reference materials) as a single entity like a chemical standard.  To them, chlorogenic acid in echinacea is as good as echinacea and caffeine in coffee is as good as coffee to them.  Hence, none of the current herb reference materials can address this inadequacy and major problem.   And I am only talking about the raw herbs!   With the finished herbal products on the market, there are no legal requirements what they should be.  Consequently, adulteration and imitations are common.  For an example, see “Chapter 9:  Adulteration Continues to be a Major Problem” of my memoir (My Life & Rollercoaster Career”).

            My group working in my laboratory under my direction had developed the RBRM (Representative Botanical Reference Materials) over 14 years ago as a key part of our Phyto-True system, but only last year did we receive a patent from the European Patent Office, 10 years after we submitted our patent application.  [see another earlier post on this blog]  Since then, this has received increasing interest.  I think this may finally be the watershed in the introduction of true herbal supplements/medicines to modern health care, after enough of our general public is introduced to this concept and like the idea.   

              Nevertheless, this is just the beginning.  But we can change the status quo and finally achieve better natural health with a more holistic approach, more in conformance with foods than individual chemicals.  I trust our younger generations with bright brains, and without preconditioned prejudice, can apply new and appropriate sciences to break the vicious cycle and to treat herbs more like foods to match the imprecision and chaos they encounter, which is our complex body. 

Posted 4/25/19  –  7:29pm

For decades, we have mistakenly considered drug therapy to be modern and scientific, but not so with herbal therapy. The reason is that we have never paid much attention to the most important aspect of our therapeutic process (therapy, for short) – our body.  Without our body, there is no therapy.  Yes, modern drugs are scientific, often developed with highly advanced scientific technologies at the molecular or cellular level, zeroing in on a minuscule part of our body.  As far as I know, none of them is developed within our complex body with intra- and/or inter-cellular communication among other living matters that make up our body.  On the other hand, herbs or herbal formulations may be developed scientifically (though highly unlikely at this point in time) or by whatever traditional means.  Nevertheless, like drugs, these herbs and formulas meet chaos as soon as they enter our body, making drug therapy NOT scientific, but rather, a trial-and-error endeavor.  Read about what drug therapy really is as described in my earlier post, “A Disruptive Concept in Drug Therapy.”

Berberine as a dietary (chemical) supplement?

I first reported this 22 years ago in my Newsletter #4 (Jan 1997) for treating traveler’s diarrhea.  Years prior, the Chinese had already been using it.  It came in uncoated small yellow tablets in vials of 10 tabs each, 100 mg/tab.  I always took some with me when I started taking clients to China in the mid-1980’s.  I myself never needed it but I took it along only in case my traveling colleagues did.  It was better than some of the prescription antidiarrheal they packed in their bags.  The report is reprinted below:

“…An example of a good herb-derived drug with little toxic side effects is berberine, which the Chinese have isolated from huanglian (Coptis sinensis).  Huanglian is a common herbal drug with cooling and detoxifying properties, used for treating various conditions, including hemorrhage (e.g., vomiting blood and nosebleed), fidgeting, vomiting, diarrhea, and jaundice; it is also used externally to treat mouth sores, skin sores, and red eyes.  This isolated berberine is now widely available in China and in overseas Chinese communities as an antibacterial, especially effective as an antidiarrheal.  If you intend to travel to third-world countries, especially for the first time, it pays to take along some berberine.  It is as good (if not more so) as any modern antidiarrheals.  However, berberine is NOT equivalent to huanglian, nor are ginsenosides to ginseng (Asian or American).  It is easy and cheap to isolate and for this reason, you will never see it produced here, because there will not be any big profit for producing and marketing it.”  [From p. 226 of my newest book, My Life & Rollercoaster Career]

Note the last sentence.  It may no longer be true. Since my first mention of berberine there, more news from Chinese sources showed this chemical drug to be effective in a few other illnesses, such as Type II diabetes, hypertension, and hyperlipemia, among others.  They are all reported in my Newsletter, now also republished elsewhere in above book (e.g., pp. 355-356). 

A word of caution about taking this chemical drug.  For use in traveler’s diarrhea and other gastrointestinal problems, the recommended dose has been 100mg – 200mg, 3 times a day.  It has been safely used in China for several decades.   With the newer use for diabetes, it is usually recommended at 1g (1,000mg), 3 times daily, which is 5 times the normal dose as an antibacterial.  If I were you, I would carefully watch for side effects (cramps, GI problems, etc.) to pop up after 2 or 3 weeks.  In the U.S.A., this would be difficult to carry out unless you, like me, don’t take any OTC or prescription drugs. So, when any toxic side effects pop up, they would most likely be due to taking this chemical.   On the other hand, it has been widely reported that roughly 50% of seniors routinely take over half-a-dozen drugs daily. Since these drugs all have side effects, there is no way for them to tell what side effects are due to which drugs.  So, just be careful and ‘listen’ to your body! 

Incidentally, I am not sure how many available berberine products are now made from synthetic berberine.  If you know they are, avoid them.  As I have explained in my books and elsewhere, synthetic drugs all have side effects, due to itself or its contamination with intermediates and byproducts from the synthetic process.  Purity is never 100.0000…%.  And I doubt any synthetic drug has all its unknown impurities tested for their toxicity before approval for human use.  Also, in my book and my article, A Disruptive Concept in Drug Therapy (www.ayslcorp.com/blog), I mentioned a synthetic chemical called W-18.  It is 5,000 to 10,000 times stronger than morphine!  How would you like a chemical like this being present as a toxic impurity in the usual 1% or 2% of your modern synthetic drug?

           If you are not sure what I mean, please read pp. 235-236 of my newest book.  It is explained there, republished here from Issue #6 of my newsletter, 22 years ago! It is also described elsewhere throughout my book whenever appropriate.  Please read it and try to understand our toxic drug problem for the sake of your grandchildren’s generation and theirs.  The Kindle version of this 550-page book is only $5.49 on www.amazon.com.  No shipping is involved and the book would be in your Kindle or Tablet within hours.  Besides, 75% or my book sales would go to efforts to break this toxic drug cycle. 

20190412

A DISRUPTIVE CONCEPT IN DRUG THERAPY

By Albert Y. Leung, PhD

If you think modern drug therapy is scientific and traditional herb therapy is not, think again.  The clue resides in our complex body…

The summary below is from “Chapter 12:  What’s Wrong with Drugs and Herbal Supplements?” of my newest book, titled My Life & Rollercoaster Career.   It summarizes my thoughts concerning drug therapy and herb therapy.  Neither of these therapies is really scientific.  Due to decades of our confusion with them, we have not been able to produce appropriate results for further meaningful work.  Instead, this confusion and its aftermath have been generating much controversy.

General Background

This disruptive concept had been occupying my thoughts for at least fifteen years but never before published in its entirety until my latest book.  It will open up a new door to traditional herbal medicines as a true alternative to toxic modern drugs.  This alternative has so far eluded us since the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA) was passed in 1994.  To help you understand how I have arrived at my conclusions, I want to explain 2 things that are essential for this concept:

1. Modern drugs are chemicals. They are well identified and defined. Thus, aspirin is aspirin and not another painkiller like Tylenol or morphine.
2. Herbs are naturally derived medicines not too different from foods (including supplements). They are all complex natural materials. They contain not just one or two chemicals, but many, actually countless. Among the countless chemicals present in them, the majority are unknown and unidentified. Therefore, no one single chemical in these natural herbs and foods can claim to hold their properties and attributes as known and documented through millennia, which is how we know the foods we eat and the herbs we ingest.

Although we identify and assess aspirin by chemical analyses, we can’t identify food and herbs simply by their contained chemicals such as pectin or ascorbic acid in apple and call either chemical ‘apple,’ nor can we analyze ginseng’s ginsenosides among many other chemicals also present (e.g., sterols, choline & oleanolic acid) and call any one particular chemical or group of chemicals ‘ginseng.’  Yet we have been doing just that for the past many decades.

The continuing processes of drug development and drug therapy need to be slowed down, and we have to reset our thinking.  This drug therapy part of our health care is a clear example. In a period of 7 or 8 decades, it has become a self-generating money-making machine at the expense of consumers.  No matter what drugs it produces and the miseries they cause, the rest of our society seems to offer no resistance.  I believe much of our expanding drug use began in the 1980’s after direct-to-consumer drug advertising was allowed, and introduced, into our homes through television, followed by the increasingly easy access to drugs supplied by the industry and elsewhere, legally or illegally.  Over the decades, pain-killers got stronger and stronger because of synthetic modifications of natural ones along with brand-new manmade ones. Thus, morphine, the first natural painkiller isolated from the opium poppy, was modified to become heroin (diacetylmorphine) that is three to five times stronger than morphine.  For years, heroin has struck fear with the general population because its addiction has killed many people. Then, Fentanyl was synthesized. It is 50-100 times stronger than morphine! And there are many such chemicals with even stronger action than the Fentanyl already synthesized. In fact, the problem has gotten much worse. Addiction to Fentanyl, oxycodone, and other readily available, over-prescribed drugs has become an epidemic in the U.S. Incidentally, another chemical called W-18 has also become increasingly reported online; it is allegedly 100 times stronger than Fentanyl, not just morphine, but Fentanyl itself! Thus, this W-18 is basically 5,000 to 10,000 times stronger than morphine!  Do we need all these strong medicines?  Thus, for their addiction, it’s not just more treatment and enforcement, or the usual rehabilitation.  Many of these efforts are not actual long-term solutions. We need to look at the source of these chemicals and the incentives to develop and produce them. As long as these drugs are available, with profit incentives for some to exploit the sad plight of the others, this epidemic will not go away. Only in terminally ill patients with intense pain should these strong painkillers be used to ease their passing. 

In addition to the above well-publicized epidemic, there is another one creeping up on us for decades. It’s our older people’s using way too many drugs.  Statistics are difficult to pinpoint, but I think it is safe to say that 40% to 50% of seniors now take more than half-a-dozen prescription drugs daily to barely function. And prescribing over a dozen drugs for these seniors to take every day is not uncommon. Reports of some seniors taking over two dozen or more drugs exist.

INAPPROPRIATE (FAUX) SCIENCE

There is one thing fundamentally wrong that we have done with drugs and herbs.  It’s our failure to consider both the therapeutic entity (drug or herb) and our body that ingests it, together.  This has led to the misconception of our complex body and the misapplication of single-chemical-oriented technologies to complex multichemical herbs, resulting in wrong or irreproducible results that have caused much controversy over decades and the current confusion in the field of herbal supplements.  What follows describes the therapeutic entity (drug or herb) and its inevitable interactions with our body which ultimately will lead to our wellbeing or demise.

THE DRUG

Scientifically, the drug itself is the least problem. It can be synthesized or isolated from nature and can be uniquely identified and analyzed without being confused with other chemicals. If it is synthetic, it is basically brand new to our planet, with no prior association with any living organisms on earth such as plants, animals, microbes, and humans.  And its actions on these living organisms are totally unknown. Hence, turning it into a drug for treating human illnesses is like throwing darts at a target, blindfolded.  Since we have not the slightest clue what this new chemical can do, we design all sorts of scientific hypotheses to find out. To test whether or not it can do a particular job, we have to make all kinds of assumptions and test it in test tubes, cells, and then in animals before subjecting the drug to human testing. During all this testing, most chemicals never make it through the initial stages. The few that have succeeded in going through these tests and clinical trials may then be approved for human use. However, it is only then that the real testing begins, and with uncertainty, like trial and error. Unlike traditional herbal medicines with millennia of human-use history, this new drug has none.  Its true human-use experience only starts now, after being approved for human use. New synthetic drugs like this have at most 100 years of human contact except for a few natural ones like morphine and ephedrine that were isolated from nature years earlier. But then, their synthetic sister drugs are the ones with which we have the most problems nowadays, including opioids and amphetamines.  Although chemically easy to define, our modern drugs have been, for decades, developed using sciences that offer no provisions to deal with the chaos encountered as soon as they enter the human body to supposedly take care of whatever makes it sick by neutralizing the presumed targeted culprit(s). To us intelligent humans, we know our body is infinitely complex and simultaneously well organized. But to a lifeless pure chemical drug entering our body, there is no direction from an all-knowing being (certainly not any scientist or medical doctor) to lead it directly to where we think the cause of our ailment is and to neutralize it. The presumed causative agent targeted can be a chemical such as a specific receptor or enzyme, any cell content, cell structure, or a myriad of other entities that make up our body. Yet we expect this developed drug to somehow navigate itself to one or two specific entities in our body to do its job without bumping into countless other moving targets to cause havoc in our body?  Good luck!  And how are we sure whatever the targeted culprits are actually the ones?  We simply don’t know!  Something is not right with this picture.  I don’t recognize the science there, and I’m a legitimate, upstanding  scientist not without accomplishments.  For decades, I had been unaware of the potential ramifications of this drug-therapy scenario before my epiphany about 15 years ago!  One thing we can call this kind of human activity – gambling!              Regardless, we have spent seventy plus years and billions and billions of dollars in developing scientific drugs yet we still don’t have decent nontoxic ones that work, without causing hidden diseases that would haunt us when we get older. In the meantime, more and more new diseases keep popping up. And we continue to spend money on these toxic drugs, whether or not they work.  Furthermore, these synthetic drugs are now ubiquitous in our environment; and I’m not even talking about agricultural chemicals! Some of the drugs are flushed down the toilet or discarded in dumps unused, while others are sent there as metabolites through our body wastes. Considering so many people take up to a dozen or more drugs per day and the pharmaceutical industry keeps producing more and more in number and in quantity to take advantage of this self-generated demand, the toxin load due to drugs in our environment must be sizable. I believe that all these are sitting on our earth like a time bomb waiting quietly for our descendants to deal with, much like toxic wastes from other manufacturing processes, but much more widely distributed throughout our earth.

THE HERBAL MEDICINE/SUPPLEMENT

At first glance, the scientific situation looks much worse with herbal products. Instead of a single constant as with a known chemical drug, we now have a so-called constant of an herb or formula consisting of multiple chemicals (both known and unknown), which hardly can be considered a constant, except maybe visually.  When we introduce this herbal entity into our complex body, we will have total chaos. However, if treated correctly, the situation can be turned in our favor because our body has co-evolved with all of the chemicals in this herbal mix since antiquity. Herbs are like foods, we have personal experience with them for millennia. We have also already inherited the knowledge to tell which is edible or not toxic, and which kills. Therefore, there is no need to start testing them from scratch as with synthetic drugs. The key is to consider them as foods, as the DSHEA had originally intended.  However, for lack of appropriate scientific technologies at the time, chemists right from the start have been treating them as drugs or pure chemicals, requiring them to meet drug standards. That is the root of most of our problems with herbal supplements. Nevertheless, the chemicals in herbs are not brand-new chemicals like synthetics that all of a sudden appear on our planet. These natural chemicals simply return to earth from where they have come. Hence, I believe there is no time bomb there for our posterity.

OUR COMPLEX BODY – THE KEY

Since we first appeared on this planet, we somehow have been given, or evolved into, an extremely complex body with all its chemicals, cells, tissues, and organs working independently and together in miraculous efficiency. We’d never be able to figure out how exactly it works and how to fix it whenever it breaks down, especially physiologically and mentally; and we’ll die trying. It would be easier to build a human-like robot from scratch and fix whatever breaks down than trying to tamper with our body that already has everything perfectly in place and is functioning well despite some rare exceptions. Any major disturbance anywhere in our body is going to affect its other parts. The ramifications can be diseases or general malaise. 

            Over the past several millennia, the Chinese have developed the yin & yang concept to try to deal with this. Thus, we are well when the yin & yang in our body are balanced; and when they are off balance, we become ill. Though we don’t know exactly what they are. Many things cause imbalance such as stress, toxic effects of drugs, and excessive physical activities, among others. There are herbs that help to restore this balance, especially the tonic herbs. The introduction of a new foreign, synthetic chemical into our body, which can go everywhere inside us trying to do its job, is bound to cause a serious disturbance. This basic flaw in our drug-therapy process might have started simply as a case of negligence or misunderstanding on the part of the scientists involved. They might have had originally developed the processes about 100 years ago but had forgotten that our body is a complex system with a myriad of living and moving materials and not simply an easily visible single entity. At the time, when the drug development and drug therapy processes were forming (> 100 years ago), it is understandable humans and plants could be physically seen as single entities and treated as such. Consequently, these processes have since been followed and enabled by other scientists, including myself, up until fifteen or so years ago. When it concerns drugs, we all have, at one time or another, without thinking, accepted our body as a single entity and not as a complex system with countless variables. So, when something like a drug gets into our body, we used to think it would deal with a single entity, but in reality, it meets instant chaos instead.  Another scenario could have been that some scientists had already realized the problem but were unsuccessful in correcting it, due to its enormous complexity, and subsequently abandoned or ignored it. The reason could have been the lack of proper scientific technologies other than the ones for pure single-chemical drugs, not suitable for complex herbs.  

            However, fast forwarded to now, with so many advanced related scientific technologies and bright young brains, I believe we can start to deal properly with our complex body to yield reproducible and meaningful results.

OUR BODY MEETS THE DRUG – IRREDEEMABLE CHAOS

When a brand-new modern synthetic drug enters our body, we have no idea how our body would react to this foreign object. Furthermore, your body is different from mine. Hence, your guess is as good as mine trying to predict how our bodies would react. One thing we may be sure is that our body would have no historical or innate memory of this new chemical. Only time would help our body to get over the initial shock and eventually get used to its presence and learn to live with it, provided it would not have killed us first. That may be centuries or millennia. For now, there is nothing we can do but grin and bear it and at the same time try to reset our thinking about drug therapy.  The most important unresolved issue remains to be our body.  Thus, when this kind of new drug enters our body, it meets chaos. This chaos cannot be resolved, due to the nature of the new drug. If it is synthetic, it is brand new to our planet. It may harm and pollute. Even if you could turn our body into a single-entity variable, you could not erase the fact that this new drug has never been tested in humans for more than a period of ten to twenty years (the time a clinical trial may take) before it is approved. Hence, its safety in humans over time is still totally unknown. In another few decades or centuries of use, some totally unexpected effects may still start showing up, good or bad.

OUR BODY MEETS THE HERBAL MEDICINE/SUPPLEMENT —

REDEEMABLE CHAOS

As I have explained earlier, herbal supplements are more complex than a chemical drug, because compared to drugs they have countless chemicals. When they enter the body to meet its contents, it is not just one item interacting with chaos (our body) as with drugs. It is itself chaos that meets more chaos to give us total chaos. Fortunately, herbs have one thing in their favor. Like foods, they have evolved with our body since ancient times, so our body has knowledge of them.  Along with their detailed documented records (esp. Chinese and Indian herbs), we know which herbs/formulas are safe and which can be rendered safe or are inherently toxic. So, there is no need of testing from scratch as with pure chemicals, especially synthetic ones. Using appropriate scientific technologies, we can make modern naturally derived drugs and current herbal supplements safer. But we have to treat herbs as foods rather than as drugs, as DSHEA rightly suggested when it was passed over twenty years ago.   So far, we have not succeeded in obtaining reproducible and meaningful results by treating herbs as drugs, requiring them to meet drug standards.  Because of this, we have so far missed the chance of making use of one of the world’s greatest natural healing resources.  Instead, we are about to let it slip from our reach by depriving the world of a true alternative to the current toxic drugs, which is a tried-and-true healing system that is second to none.

There are over 12,000 Chinese herbs and more than 130,000 herbal formulas documented in the Chinese herbal medicine (CHM) literature during a period of about 3,500 years. I have often written about this in my Leung’s Chinese Herb News (LCHN)and other publications.  Unfortunately, in recent decades, due to the strong influence of the pharmaceutical industry, Chinese scientists have been actually ‘modernizing’ CHM based on the assumed-active-chemical concept, discarding tradition as nonscientific and adopting faux science as the real thing. Because of this, during the past 16 or 17 years, CHM has become so commercialized that even one of the most well-known Chinese tonics, cured fo-ti (zhiheshouwu), has now become a chemical source for a sister chemical of resveratrol, called 2,3,5,4’-tetrahydroxystilbene glucoside (THSG). In the short span of two decades, cured fo-ti has changed its traditional character. This chemical (THSG) is currently in vogue because it is one of the strong antioxidants like resveratrol.  Before, it was barely present in the original cured fo-ti, a well-known nontoxic tonic, but is now required to be present in both raw and cured fo-ti, at 1.0 % and 0.7%, respectively, despite its new ‘antioxidant’ functions have never been demonstrated to be relevant to fo-ti’s traditional documented benefits.   

WHAT CAN WE DO WITH THE DRUGS?

Unfortunately, the drug situation has been so entrenched that there is nothing straight-forward that can be done. However, the general public needs to understand that the practice of medicine has never been totally scientific. It is not like some part of surgery and dentistry where damaged body parts can be replaced by ‘bionic’ parts with more and more precision.  In that area, examples abound, including implant lenses, teeth, joints, and other replaced body parts. Even there, it’s not all science. Skill and experience are essential, and there remains the possibility of rejection. Hence, practice of medicine has always been a mixture of art and science, and in drug therapy, only the drug part is scientific. Once it enters the body to treat an illness, it is just the physician’s experience, skill, and the art of trial and error, along with time.  This produces unpredictable results, often with side-effects some of which have since become new diseases.  I believe we should avoid synthetic chemicals and start concentrating on natural ones.  There have been precedents, such as artemisinin for malaria and cannabidiol (CBD) for epilepsy.  However, once they are synthesized, the impurities (intermediates, byproducts, etc.) present are bound to cause trouble.  And I don’t believe we can ever have ‘accelerated’ human testing. 

WHAT CAN WE DO WITH HERBAL MEDICINES/SUPPLEMENTS?

Compared to drugs, herbal supplements are a very minor part of our healthcare expenditures – tens of billions of dollars versus hundreds of billions to trillions with drugs. Drugs are a large part of our national health care; and heath care consumes a major part of our government’s and our own financial resources.  We can’t do much about drugs for now but we certainly can do something immediately about herbs. We can proceed in two stages.  The first is to improve the current herbal supplements on the market, some of which are mostly chemicals or drugs disguised as herbal supplements. The second is to bring well-known CHM formulas in a truly modernized form to modern health care, using appropriate scientific technologies, starting with Phyto-True, whose concept and technology were mentioned earlier, which is described in detail in our patent application and my research paper (see www.ayslcorp.com/blog & A.Y. Leung, Tradition- and science-based quality control of traditional Chinese medicine – introducing the Phyto-True system, J. AOAC International 93 (5): 1355-1366 (2010). 

1. To get rid of fake herbal supplements to be sure consumers are taking the real ones and derive from them their traditionally known and documented benefits.   This will not only save them money by no longer taking ‘supplements’ with no traditional health benefits, but will also prevent possible deleterious effects due to their taking merely new chemicals with inert carriers whose long-term effects are not known.   This can be accomplished by setting up a nonprofit organization to analyze products that consumers find suspicious.  The results can be published online in the organization’s website with Phyto-True fingerprints of the products, along with the method of analysis, so that the purveyors of these products can have a chance to contest the results should these happen not to comply with theirs.
2. Among the over 130,000 herbal formulas documented in the CHM literature, hundreds are already commercially available in Southeast Asia; and dozens are available in America.   Despite my drug training, my family and I prefer some of these formulas over the ubiquitously touted Western over-the-counter medicines. They are for common conditions such as colds, flus, stomach problems, coughs, nasal congestion, hay fever, pimples, canker sores, and gastrointestinal problems, among others.  Most of these have already been relabeled to conform to the semantics of herbal supplements per DSHEA.  With the newly available Phyto-True technologies, these herbal supplement products can carry their unique individual fingerprints so that consumers would know what is real and what’s fake.  At present, there is no simple way for consumers to tell the identify and quality of two products that have the exact same herbal ingredients on their labels.  The reason is due to the fact that we tried to regulate herbal supplements as food but right from the start we treated/tested them as drugs, requiring them to meet drug standards.  Yet there were no herb standards (comparable to drug standard for drugs) until more recently when our Phyto-True system was published.  This is certainly not what the DSHEA has intended.   Because of my distaste for politics in both industrial and academic research, I have never been associated with any particular political factions over the past 20 to 30 years.   Hence, I have had little open support from my colleagues for my innovative discoveries during this period.   Consequently, I am turning to you, the general public, to spread the word.  The health of our children’s and grandchildren’s generations is at stake, which can be mitigated by the actions I have proposed. 

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