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:
- Modern drugs are chemicals. They are well identified and defined. Thus, aspirin is aspirin and not another painkiller like Tylenol or morphine.
- 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).
- 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.
- 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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