Author: ayslblog

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. 

20190402

Please visit www.nytimes.com/Kristof and see Nicholas Kristof’s piece last Friday, March 22, 2019.  After Nick had reported the story of an 8-year-old homeless boy who had just become the chess champion of his age group in New York State, the response of his readers exemplified our true American spirit (esp. compassion & generosity), so well known around the world.  Within a week, the boy and family have a home and some financial security.  In response to the overwhelming generosity of Kristof’s readers, who raised over $200,000 for them, the family has decided to not use any of the money on themselves, but, instead, on other African immigrants who need assistance.   This quality is what has made our nation great!  Help me give the Adewumi family a belated welcome.  And Nick, thank you for bringing this story to us!  I have been your fan for years. 

Albert Y. Leung, PhD.

www.ayslcorp.com/blog

One of the major reasons behind the passage of DSHEA is that consumers wanted more natural products for their health. They didn’t want to have more new chemical drugs whose long-term safety is still unknown. Chemicals like ephedrine, and other amphetamine-like compounds, whether isolated from nature or synthesized, are not equivalent to the herbs from which they are derived. They are drugs and should be considered and regulated as such, and not as dietary or herbal supplements! Our current law does not distinguish herbs that are used solely to treat illnesses from others that have traditionally been used as foods or tonics. Both can legally be sold as dietary supplements. The former usually have toxic side effects and are meant only for short-term use, while the latter have hundreds or thousands of years of documented safe-use history and have traditionally been used as supplements to our diet. Hence the latter are true herbal supplements while the former are not. The former includes mahuang, ephedrine, N-methyltyramine, synephrine, feverfew, and St. John’s wort; the latter includes tea, ginseng, watercress, licorice, hawthorn, ginger, Job’s tear, lycium, and astragalus.

The above comment is directly lifted from my Newsletter, Issue #13, March/April, 1998 (LCHN-13), now on page 285 of My Life & Rollercoaster Career.  It was 21 years ago and 25 years after the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA) was passed in 1994.   This statement is still true today, 25 years after herbal supplements were created as a new class of herbal products, regulated as food, yet we have been treating (analyzing) them as drugs since day one, requiring them to meet drug standards.  How different is this from analyzing pectin in apple and call pectin, apple?  Or any ginsenoside in Asian ginseng, and called the chemical, ginseng?  I often wonder why few, if any, of the herb or drug experts have ever expressed their opinion on this issue?  And we are still making a lot of herbal supplements containing no other herbal elements than standardized chemicals with fillers.  I think it’s time to start showing the fingerprints of all herbal products.  If the companies don’t do it, we, as consumers, can do it for them so that you can avoid buying their products with dubious identity and quality.  My associates and I have all the technical capabilities of starting it.  All you have to do is to buy my new books.  I am going to apportion 75% of their gross profits to this project.

This article is about a Chinese college student, out of pride for his han heritage, a need to belong, or for whatever reason, has been occasionally wearing hanfu (clothing of the ancient han).  His fellow enthusiasts claim to number a million who regularly wear this kind of ancient han dress.  Their movement started almost 20 years ago and has finally attracted the attention of the Chinese media and government, hence now also the western press (e.g., The Economist).  It’s admirable that these young people are proud of Chinese history and want to live part of it now in their own way.           

As an American of Chinese descent, I am also proud of my Chinese heritage, especially its unique healing system, Chinese herbal medicine, with which I have grown up.  However, over the years, I have been watching it slip away and eventually would be relegated to historical museums.  As opposed to reliving the costume aspect of our ancient ancestors, the benefits of Chinese medicine cannot be retrieved from the ‘ashes’ (museums).  The scientists and people of my generation, and the one after, have mostly been brain washed in the past decades into accepting the vicious drug cycle.  They are now so entrenched in the drug mentality or indebted to Big Pharma and its associates that nobody except some as yet unknown, unbiased and un-indebted members of the younger generation are free to think and act.  I hope some of these bright young people can channel their energy in spreading the word on saving Chinese herbal medicine – a tried-and-true healing treasure.           For a detailed explanation of my premise, please visit my last post, in 5 segments, titled “Do you think drug therapy is scientific but herbal therapy is still stuck in the dark ages?  Think again and read on…”

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

Synthetic Drugs versus Traditional Herbal Medicines

 Two Different Systems of Therapy

 

In recent years we hear so much about evidence-based medicine?  What is it?  Does it mean scientific?  Or is it accumulated Grandmas’ wisdom?

First of all, with chemical drugs that are easily identifiable and quantifiable such as aspirin and morphine, their development and production may be scientific.  However, once they enter a complex multi-cellular organism like our body, this therapeutic process can hardly be considered scientific.  We may use scientific technologies to control and analyze the drugs (their purity, dosage, and methods of administration, etc.) but we can’t control our body by telling its millions of chemicals and cells to step aside when the drugs enter it, so that they can go directly to their presumed targets (receptors, enzymes, or other living matters) to do their magic.  Without precise guidance, these drugs are bound to bump into many of the living matters in our highly organized and extremely well-functioning body to cause havoc.  This process is simply trial and error, not scientific.  And it hasn’t changed since our ancestors started treating our illnesses with herbs, minerals, or animal products millennia ago.  When one herb (or drug) does not work, try another.  That is pretty much it.  How scientific can that be?  It’s the skill, compassion, and experience of the healer more than anything else, as always, since the beginning of human existence.  Hence, for centuries, the practice of medicine has been invariably considered an art.  Or could evidence-based medicine also mean to include historical experience of traditional herbal medicine in addition to the modern treatment with toxic drugs?

Actually, the difference between modern synthetic drugs and natural medicines (e. g., herbs) definitely has played a crucial role since the modern drug era started 200-300 years ago.   Natural medicines are taken from our environment and sooner or later will return to it.  This has been going on since antiquity.  If they don’t work, they cause us no harm.  Nor would they seriously damage our environment.   On the other hand, with synthetic drugs, it’s another story.  They are mostly toxic because these chemicals are brand new to our environment and have never before interacted with us on our planet, despite the fact that one of its major raw material sources is petroleum.  Though we have never ingested it to have lived to tell our experience.  Whatever we tried to do with herbs eons ago when our ancestors started to develop our systems of traditional medicines by trial and error are now deemed non-scientific by many, if not most, scientists.   Regardless, by now we have already accumulated millennia of experience, knowledge, and wisdom on these medicines.  And we know what are safe and what are not.  In contrast, modern drug therapy has no more than 300 years or so of accumulated experience.  Even after a drug has successfully passed clinical trials, it still always has side-effects many of which are toxic, because it may also contain impurities due to intermediates and byproducts resulting from the synthetic process, which cannot be completely removed.   The traditional wisdom among chemists and scientists has always been that synthetic and natural chemicals are the same because they have the same chemical structure whether they are synthetic or derived from nature, as long as they are both pure.  Yet we have never bothered to take these impurities seriously.  We set limits for them.  But as far as I can tell, during my long years being educated in drugs and natural chemicals, as well as my years involved in these fields as a professional, we seemed never to have bothered to test specifically for the toxicities of these impurities.  When you scan the United States Pharmacopeia (U.S.P., our official book on drug standards) you will find there is always a small to sizable percentage of impurities allowed in the drugs.   The range of these impurities span from around 2% to 10%, or more, with natural drugs (chemicals) being allowed the higher limits.  It seems whoever set these limits of impurities already had an implicit understanding that the impurities in natural medicines are less toxic than those accompanying synthetic drugs, hence our body can tolerate more of them, whatever they are.  Because of these synthetic drugs being brand new, along with their equally brand-new impurities, our body’s experience would take probably centuries or millennia before it would get used to them, just as it had gotten used to the natural substances, including natural chemicals, before we finally have come to know the nature of some of them to consider them now safe and effective.  Consequently, this modern scenario is not unlike the progression of the development of traditional herbal medicines – trial and error over time, until we can determine which works or is not toxic, and which kills.

Can anyone, especially those involved in the original coining of the phrase “evidence-based medicine,” tell us, in understandable language, what it actually means, now that I have given my ‘simple-minded’ arguments?  If you read my earlier posts and my newest dual book, you may agree with me.  Like me, you may also have been trained in college and graduate/medical school the Big-Pharma way and may not realize there is another true therapy option, which you may have already dismissed as not scientific or evidence-based.  Until 15 to 20 years ago, I was like you, always thinking the same way – active principles.  Only my Chinese medicine upbringing since childhood finally made me realize the problem.  Chemical drugs and multi-chemical herbs cannot be treated the same way.  The technology established specifically for analyzing simple drugs cannot be applied to complex herbs to produce consistent and meaningful results that we expect.  It is not unlike trying to analyze pectin (one of the countless chemicals present in apple) and call that chemical, apple; or chlorogenic acid in echinacea and call that chemical, echinacea.  Wouldn’t you brand that process ‘pseudoscience,’ as many of us call herbal medicine?

Thank you all!  Watch for my next 2 posts. One is on the imminent demise of traditional herbal medicine, unless…  The other is for producers and/or marketers of genuine cannabidiol, CBD, on how to be leaders in the crowded field of this lucrative business by showing your products’ unique fingerprints, not just hype.

As this subject is not trivial, to avoid mutual embarrassment, please send serious comments to my personal email:  ayl@earthpower.com

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

 

20181231

I use the computer but I am not savvy with its inner workings.  Just a couple of weeks ago, I was trying to access my blog and discovered that when I typed www.ayslcorp.com/blog on Google Bing, it didn’t lead me to my blog.  Instead, I was directed to TheScientist website www.the-scientist.com featuring an article “Biotechnology Turns To Ancient Remedies In Quest For Sources Of New Therapies” in its January 6, 1997 issue.

It is 9 pages long, printed.  In this article, I was quoted in the last 3 pages, so were some prominent scientists and colleagues that I know, throughout the piece.  They include Michael Balick, Eric Larson, Paul Gross, Steven King, Freddie Ann Hoffman, John Babish, and Sylvia Lee-Huang along with a few other Chinese scientists not within my area of expertise, whom I don’t know.

That reminds me of Mike Balick and me being suckered into a charity event in New York that turned out to be a scam organized by a Korean woman along with a fairly well-known TV personality (a male reporter) around New York.  There were 2 expert speakers at the event.  Mike and I.  I had only agreed to particulate when I saw Mike’s name on the program and volunteered my time as did Mike who also saw my name. I don’t remember the details except it was on a yacht moored on the East River. There were maybe a dozen people.  Mike and I met and we were chagrined.  Then it rained cats and dogs, and I stayed briefly and left. Probably Mike did too.  That was probably between 20 and 30 years ago.  It could be the last time we saw each other.

 

Anyway, this article was published almost 20 years ago.  But the following key elements in the standard drug discovery process from natural sources haven’t changed:

 

1. It is still only focusing on active chemicals and their precise identification and characterization.
2. Most scientists still view herbal medicines only as 1 or 2 of the many chemical(s) they contain or those isolated from them.
3. The primary incentive continues to be greed, making as much money as possible from patented chemicals, totally ignoring non-patentable herbal therapeutics or other affordable, easy-to-make therapies to afford our rapidly-expanding, financially-struggling fellow Americans. What has happened to our democracy, family values, and compassion for your neighbors?  The exploitation of American consumers by the drug industry and its interdependent associates has already firmly established itself in our society with its perpetual money-making machine that I call the vicious cycle of toxic drugs.   The more toxic drugs this consortium produces, the more side effects and diseases they generate, which, in turn, need to be treated with more drugs, in perpetuity, and with total impunity for the drug consortium.  I have described this vicious cycle extensively in my memoir (visit my blog www.ayslcorp.com/blog for more information).  This vicious cycle is real, yet most Americans seem to have no clue about it.  The drug consortium and a minor indebted, moneyed class are not going to do anything about it.  It’s up to us the non-privileged public to start from the bottom up.

 

What is not discussed is the myth that Chinese medicine (CM) is not scientific but modern drug therapy is.  How so?  Just consider a chemical drug or an herb entering our body consisting of a myriad of chemicals and cells.  It is supposed to go to certain enzyme, receptor or whatever, to block it from functioning certain ways so as to resolve the problem.  How would it get there with all these billions of chemicals and cells in its path without precise guidance?  Wouldn’t it bump into at least some of them and disturb our body’s extremely organized and well-functioning, balanced state, which would cause chaos, hence side effects?  That process (more like gambling) certainly doesn’t seem scientific to me whether the ‘hero’ is a drug or an herb!

 

All the scientists quoted were either brainwashed by Big Pharma or had no insight into Chinese medicine, still persistently seeking active principles (simple chemicals) and wondering how, or oblivious to how, to solve the complex multichemical-herbs problem.  Thus, over the past 20 plus years, the search for new drugs have not changed.  It is still chemicals and more chemicals.

However, a quote from Mike Balick caught my attention when he describes CM versus other traditional herbal systems, “… It’s written down, taught in medical schools, and has been refined and developed over thousands of years.  It’s a living, vibrant system compared with other traditional systems around the world that are in danger of dying out.” Mike is basically correct, except he seemed to be unaware that the CM had been heading towards the same fate.  I have extensively explained this in my recent books and I am actively trying to let the world know about it.  And that’s why I will continue to blog about this, as long as possible.

 

After all these years when I rediscovered this article and read my own comments quoted by the author, Alison Mack, I feel right at home.  Here they are:

 

“It’s very easy to take a Chinese herb with multiple functions, go after a single active chemical and forget about the total picture,” observed pharmacognosist Albert Leung … “The real challenge,” Leung says, “is to take traditional herbs used for specific purposes and discover how they work.”  That’s a difficult proposition, because “modern science can’t handle multiple effects,” he explains. “Well-known, useful herbs never get a complete study, because [Western scientists] behave like the blind men examining the elephant.  They can only describe the trunk, the ear, the tail – they never understand the whole animal.” 

           Rather than attempt to describe every active chemical present in a Chinese herbal prescription, as well as their interactions, Leung and others advocate evaluating such complex formulas as a whole…

           Leung describes the situation more vividly, “It’s a mess, a real Wild West.  There are no regulations [governing the composition of herbal supplements].”  Some unscrupulous manufacturers, he says, “are making millions selling water and hydrolyzed starch.”

 

Actually, I had totally forgotten about this article.  That was at an era when the Office of Alternative Medicine still existed.  Because of my background and experience, I was selected as its prime reviewer of proposals for its first or second round of research funding and I was given 6 proposals to review.  Out of these six I reviewed, 2 or 3 that I recommended for funding, were funded.  Other than that, I don’t remember much about my interactions with the government at that time.  If you read my memoir, you’d see my history of interacting with our government, especially NIH, NCI, NCCAM, and my experience with federal contracts and grants.  As in scientific research, all I can say is that too much politics is present, and it seems whoever speaks the loudest has the ‘truth.’

 

Regardless, since this article appeared 20 years ago, the drug industry has increasingly controlled our drug development and production processes and thus undeservedly receiving a large, if not the largest single, chunk of our government’s spending in health care.  Looking back, nothing has changed after all these years.  Traditional Chinese medicines (CM) have still not been properly investigated; we are only looking for specific chemicals in them or from them.  Greed still dominates the drug and herbal industries.  However, what I said (as quoted in the article) is still true.  All these years, even though I have never had any career plans, I somehow have accomplished what I had originally set out to do, which is to introduce CM to modern health care alongside ‘modern’ drug therapy.   When I read my own comments, I easily recognize my frank and sometimes tactless style of writing and speech which has offended some people and even colleagues and friends.  I finally realized that.  Which is why I have written my memoir to let others know of my communication handicap, not known to even some close friends, as a form of apology.  At the same time, I have also documented my new discoveries regarding CM that can now be truly modernized to serve side by side conventional drug therapy, making use of our Phyto-True system, whose RBRM (an herbal standard) was recently granted a European patent.  Although I no longer have my competent staff nor have I a publicity agent, at my advance age, I am starting to blog in earnest.  Sooner or later, my message for safer and modernized tried-and-true natural medicines will get noticed.

The last time I checked, maybe 15 years ago, 80% or more of the world’s population still relied on old fashion traditional medicines.  With this newly patented technology, it opens up new opportunities for truly modernized CM for world health care.  But I don’t want these to be turned into consumer-gouging enterprises controlled by a few moneyed businessman as with modern drugs.  Which is why I hope some unindebted health organizations, institutes, or governments would pick up the baton.  I can email you a copy of the general prospectus.  If interested, please clearly identify your organization in your request.  I would be especially interested in receiving requests from nonprofit organizations.  Or from individuals with social-media business expertise who believe in fairness in business and not just in maximizing profits at all costs, without compassion for the less fortunate.  I am ready to offer my expertise free of charge as long as it is not used to exploit others.

A.Y. Leung

Si ustedes se sienten más cómodos escribiendo en español por favor háganlo.  Yo puedo leerlo.   Gracias!

A.Y.  Leung (Alberto)