The rationale behind my arriving at “A DISRUPTIVE CONCEPT IN DRUG THERAPY” – 11th and final Post

Modern drug therapy is not working! We need to break its vicious cycle by reintroducing time-tested natural therapeutics.  Join me if you agree.

It’s all about our Body & Time with Herbs & Chemical Drugs, plus Greed!

This is my final post on this paper.  Since I uploaded it on April 2, 2019, I have written 10 posts explaining why I think modern drug therapy is not working.  It is stuck in a vicious cycle after 80 long years of trying, which now benefits only drug makers.

It is due to two inherent factors that are out of our control, our body and too little time given for it to interact with drugs to show whether or not they work.   Our body is not a mechanical machine in which every component piece is accounted for.  We have knowledge on only some tiny bits and pieces of it.  Also, each of us has an invisible, untouchable soul.  And we are all different, body and soul, from one another.  Even identical twins are not totally alike.  Yet, when traditional herbal therapy was transitioned into modern drug therapy in Europe some 200 plus years ago, most of our scientist forebears were unaware of the fact that the new chemical drugs might have to go through what herbs had gone through when herbal therapy started ages ago by trial and error before some being shown to be safe and effective.  Hence, new chemical drugs are only in the infant stage of time-testing in humans.  Already, we are in a downward spiral, controlled by a few greedy people who are perpetually raking in undeserved billions, with all the incentives to keep it as is, without any lasting benefits whatsoever for the rest of humanity.  This is modern drug therapy.  

With herbal therapy, the body and time factors don’t matter as much (described in the paper), since the body has known them and they have been time tested.  However, before any work performed involving herbs such as herb therapy or drug therapy, it is essential to first recognize and understand the differences between an herb and a chemical in order to achieve the expected results we seek.  In the case of pure drug therapy, some of the expected results may not come for some of us in our lifetime, due to the 2 inherent factors of drug therapy.

The above concepts are obviously not an easy combination for one to grasp, because during my 56 years of working with drugs and herbs, I realized these problems only 16 years ago – 40 years into my career!  Since then, I have been trying to get these across to my scientist colleagues.  Yet some of them still don’t seem to have gotten them.  

Because of this, most of the data on herbs in world databases is only relevant for the chemical part of herbs; the traditional part relating to history, properties, and benefits is often rendered irrelevant by mistreating herbs as mere chemicals, discarding the rest.  Hence, most research to-date on traditional herbs has not been conducted properly, resulting repeatedly in wrong or irrelevant data.  That, in turn, has led to herbs being denigrated by our conventional medical colleagues as not scientific and of no therapeutic value, because it was based on drug technologies taught us by Big Pharma, misapplied to herbs! 

The fact that I have received awards (a contract & a grant) the only two times I have ever responded to requests for proposals (RFP) from National Institutes of Health during my 56 years of my research career (including my MS and PhD research) is probably due to my scientific insight into both herbs and drugs in therapy and other matters. 

The first was back in 1985 and 1986 (33-34 yrs ago) when we won both Phases I and II of a database contract awarded by the National Cancer Institute to build a database of antitumor herbs.  My competitor was the group that had developed the world-famous database called NAPRALERT. 

Details of that contract is described in Chapter 8 of my memoir titled “David vs. Goliath: NCI SBIR Phase II Database Contract, What if?…”  Out of 13 proposals, we both won the Phase I contracts.  Then, after months of initial research as proof of concept, we were invited to submit Phase II proposals for further research and for commercializing the database.  The Phase I contract was $50,000.  But the Phase II contract was for $1,000,000.  Further details are in the chapter mentioned above.

It seems obvious the technical reviewers at that time (33 years ago) already recognized the value of my new ideas to not just looking blindly at chemicals but also at the true value of traditional medicines.  The current situation is not that much different, as the benefits of time-tested remedies have never been properly evaluated even up to now.  Regardless, after witnessing this kind of nepotism politics that I detest, I have avoided socializing with people in industry, academia, and government who are known to be a part of this.  And which is also why I didn’t apply to any government agencies for any grants for over 13 years until in 2000 when a friend and colleague alerted me to an RFP for an SBIR grant from NCCAM for feverfew research.  I took that as a chance to prove my correct approach to research on complex herbs.   We applied and won the grant for both Phases I & II.   Some of the research results were used in the development of our Phyto-True System.  [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)]

The Phyto-True System we have developed has taken all above subtleties into consideration.  For the first time in herb research, traditional medicines (herbs & formulas) can now be properly evaluated.   Instead of testing them with only one or two of their arbitrarily selected chemicals in mind, without success and tossed aside, the true long-documented values and benefits of traditional medicines can now be truly and scientifically evaluated.  So far, the decades-long efforts to test herbal medicines for their value by scientists trained by Big-Pharma technologies (including myself pre year 2000) have not produced any useful results.  Up to this date, among the estimated 130,000 formulas recorded in the Chinese literature over the past few thousand years, not a single formula has been proven ‘scientific’ and effective by my scientist colleagues using drug technologies that are specifically developed for only chemical drugs

In the meantime, research scientists continue to pursue drug therapy with new drugs, ignoring or wishing the two inherent elements of drug therapy would disappear or magically vanish, but all such efforts still end up in the vicious cycle that has become  a perpetual money machine for Big Pharm, but continuing ill health and often financial ruin for many Americans.  Unless broken, this vicious cycle within the drug-therapy establishment continues to enrich the drug industry and its interdependent associates that include the medical profession, insurance companies, crooked politicians and government officials, among others.  Just check out the new drug, Ingrezza, for treating a disease called Tardive Dyskinesia suffered by half-a-million Americans after taking common psychotic, epileptic, and gastrointestinal drugs over the years.  Do you still wonder why the beneficiaries of the vicious cycle want to defend and maintain the status quo?

On my part, I can’t do much about drug therapy for now or in the near-term future, except to continue blogging to publicize its vicious cycle and to draw attention to its potentially wide-ranging human health destruction.   Hopefully the word would spread to the general public who has not yet heard of it, and get enough people to support my work towards breaking the vicious cycle and afford the general public, especially our grandchildren’s generation and theirs, truly modernized natural therapeutics. 

What I am proposing will not interfere with existing laws governing herbal supplements, nor will new ingredients be introduced.  Here are the two things I can do to facilitate the improvement of current herbal supplements and to afford such improved products to the general public as natural alternatives to expensive toxic drugs:

1. Improvement of current herbal supplements.   At present there are no requirements for testing finished herbal products, except maybe for some standardized marker chemicals.  There are also no uniform standards for herb derivatives, such as the types of extracts and chemicals.  From my experience, few manufacturers show evidence of what are in these products other than what are listed on their labels.  I know for a fact two herbal supplements with exactly the same herbal ingredients on their labels will have different fingerprints, some drastically so, unless they both are made with extracts from the same supplier.  [see Chapter 9:  Adulteration Continues to be a Major Problem of my Memoir]

My first task is to work with consumers and competent analytical labs as well as a few selected small manufacturers that I know produce good genuine products.  First is to test the commercial herbal supplements being taken by the selected consumers, comparing them to other commercial products, including those from the manufacturers we have selected, which have the exact or very similar ingredients on their labels.  We’d then compare their results and advise the consumers of them to let them decide which to take.

2. Providing consumers with genuine herbal products with identity and quality fingerprints at affordable prices.  Despite drug therapy being stuck in a vicious cycle, I can see an opening through which we can replace the synthetic chemical drugs with natural herbs, because the latter have already had prior interactions with our body since antiquity.  Thus, the body and time elements won’t apply to them in herbal therapy, because they have already done it, at least millennia longer than mere decades that our new modern drugs are still experiencing.

My main purpose is to break the drug vicious cycle and to afford future consumers genuine good-quality herbal supplements as natural alternatives to toxic drugs.  If you have been a conscientious manufacturer or herbalist who want to be part of this endeavor, please send a personal email to me describing your operation, and include your phone number so that I can call some of you in the next few months to discuss this potential joint project.  If you want to be a consumer and/or supporter, please send me an email expressing your wishes and I’ll let you know when we are ready.  I don’t intend to make money with this.  But if you want to be a consumer and supporter, all I ask is for you to buy at least one of my books published last year and either send me the date of your receipt or a photo of the order or receipt by email.   Your name and email address will be retained for updating you on our progress.  If you are a supplier or marketer looking for business, please don’t contact me, unless you are a rare breed who are willing and able to support a brand-new nonprofit with genuine herbal extracts, not something like ‘pure’ huzhang (Japanese knotweed) extract with 90% resveratrol or ‘pure’ Chinese ginseng extract with 95% ginsenosides; or products made with such so-called ‘extracts.’  In any case, any purchases of my books will contribute substantially to our cause in breaking the vicious cycle, and will be greatly appreciated.

There are already many Western herbal formulas being sold in America, so are dozens of Chinese tonic formulas.  Most of them are well known for their tonic benefits, meaning removing inflammation, modulating immunity, removing toxins, strengthening our body to help it resist or avoid being sick, etc.  I will try to interest reputable manufacturers and research institutions to get involved and start planning to work with our associated analytical labs on such products, so that they will all carry meaningful fingerprints.  The fingerprints won’t just show certain known chemicals, but also unknown constituents of the herbs.   Initially, the Western herbal supplements will be selected from manufacturers founded and run by honest and compassionate herbalists who would be willing to lower their prices for our nonprofit, consumer crowd-funded operation.  Our main customers would be the consumers who fund us.  These products, with their beneficial properties, will help break the vicious cycle to keep us healthy so that we won’t be dragged into it.  They can be drop-shipped from the manufacturers’ facilities.    

 I don’t know when I’ll be ready to set up the nonprofit because I have never done this before.  But in another few months to maybe a year, with your support and others who are helping me, I should be ready.  Then, our nonprofit and book accounts should have been set up, with 75% of their gross profits going to the nonprofit.  With your support (including my young millennial friends), we can practically start a new movement and a new herbal industry in healthcare, not based on greed, bypassing the drug-therapy establishment.  For your information, I am happy to notice that many of my fast-growing connections are already doing this with their different specialties in alternative medicine.  Keep up the good work, my fellow herbalists, healers, listeners, and like-minded colleagues!  Stay away from the vicious cycle!          

Finally, since I have no experience whatsoever with homoeopathy products and I don’t believe there is an easy way to have meaningful fingerprints for them, our supplements will not include them.