Author: ayslblog

Some ‘herbal’ supplements are not herbal. What should we do?

First of all, I want to run a thought by my pharmaceutical scientist colleagues and friends.   We have tried for 80 plus years now in search of cures, have we found any signs of any synthetic drug that doesn’t simultaneously cause major damage, some of which turn into new diseases that end up in our vicious cycle?  This cycle affords its owners perpetual income with impunity, but toxic drugs to you, me, and the rest of our society with their attendant miseries, such as side effects and new diseases.  Do you think that’s ethical, fair, or humane?  And these drugs will also affect your grandchildren and theirs.  Isn’t it time we reset our thinking in this extremely costly ‘scientific’ pursue of our drug-therapy, at least for the benefit of our future generations?  A lot of traditional natural remedies do work and can complement or even replace synthetic drugs to serve all humans at affordable costs.  After 50 years as a home-grown herbalist and also as a scientist, I can attest to that!

You may have the feeling that many herbal supplements are not what they claim to be.  You are right. 

Many of them are not, for 2 main reasons:  (1) We, as scientists, don’t seem to know how to deal with them scientifically, using technologies developed for well-identified pure chemical drugs, trying to apply them to complex multi-chemical herbs that are in most instances not different from foods. (2) As herbalists, many of us who have no scientific training are easily bamboozled by anyone with a science degree into going along with determining the identity and quality of an herb by one of its countless chemicals, and call this chemical ‘marker’ of identity and quality for the herb or formula; and declare that this is scientific.  Then, we standardize the finished herbal product (supplement or medicine) against this chemical and call the product “herbal supplement.”  This invites adulteration!  I personally have been a victim of it.  Which is one of the reasons I had fought this single-handedly for decades, especially after the DSHEA was passed in 1994.  See one of my descriptions of this “standardization” in Issue 10 (Sept/Oct 1997) of my Newsletter republished in My Life & Rollercoaster Career (p. 263).  Then, in the following decades, I have written many more times about it.  Although this standardization thing has gotten less egregious over the last 10 to 15 years, it still happens, and more than you think.   Hence, some herbal supplements are still not what they claim to be.   What should we do?

Before reintroducing some tried-and-true herbal remedies, passed down from generation to generation over millennia or time immemorial, we need to first start fixing the identity and quality of the existing herbal supplements.  Since these products are not like drugs that can easily be analyzed, some other scientific methods must be used.  Instead of using drug techniques specifically developed for chemicals, which are unsuitable for complex herbs, we should start treating herbal supplements more as foods, which was the original intent of the DSHEA, either by design or by chance.    For example, ascorbic acid is no orange or lemon.  So, the best we can do now with herbal supplements is to provide some ‘fingerprint’ that can tell us what they look like compared to others.  With this fingerprint, identifying the tablets, capsules, or powders, in a bottle of ‘herbal supplements’ is roughly comparable to our identifying oranges or apples by organoleptic means.  That is, not by any of their chemicals such as ascorbic acid or pectin, but by sight, touch, taste, smell, etc., which we used to use for judging raw herbs until chemistry started to be involved, analyzing only arbitrarily selected marker chemicals.

      For doing this, we already have the basic technology to make fingerprints. The best is through HPTLC, HPLC, IR, and UV, as we have been doing with our Phyto-True system since around 2005.  One of the labs has already volunteered its efforts at cost.  And I am planning to use 75% of the gross profits of my books to establish a nonprofit, to be run by younger people not from my generation, though a few of us will initially provide the appropriate technologies, experience, and wisdom to help get it started.

In the next post, I’ll describe my plans for starting the introduction of modernized natural therapeutics to complement or replace synthetic drugs.  So, until then, all the best! 

Modernized natural alternatives and natural replacements for toxic synthetic drugs

I was born and raised in Hong Kong in a family with a TCM tradition, using only Chinese medicines until I was in my teens.  Being a kid with a short attention span, I flunked out of elementary school and then again out of high school, in what is equivalent to our sophomore year here, after failing 3 or 4 subjects (one of which was music, basically singing in front of my class).  I then skipped a grade, graduated from another high school with honors, and went to Taiwan to attend the National Taiwan University.  There, I earned a B.S. degree in pharmacy, doing exceptionally well in pharmacognosy.  When I applied to 2 universities in the U.S. to pursue graduate studies, the University of Michigan accepted me and also offered me a teaching assistantship.  Who could turn that down?  So, I was there in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for 5 years before getting a PhD in Pharmacognosy (study of natural drugs).  After finishing my studies in Michigan, at the time, teaching opportunities for Asian students were few, my advisor found me a postdoctoral position at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center to work on the biosynthesis of opium alkaloids and the isolation of new opioids from the opium poppy plant.  That basically started my rollercoaster career for more than 50 years – from natural-product chemist, entrepreneur, salesman, chief research microbiologist in single-cell protein production from petroleum, director of R&D in herbal extraction, owner and director of several companies in the research and production of herbal products (supplements) specializing in Chinese herbs, and then principal investigator of an SBIR database contract awarded by the National Cancer Institute, to principal investigator of an SBIR grant from NCCAM, NIH, on herb identification and standardization, etc.

My point in telling you all these (mostly already covered in my books), is that, being outside of the academic circle for a person like me, would probably give me a unique perspective not gained if I had been in a stable, tenured academic position.  This varied real-life experience in seeing how herbs and drugs actually being promoted to, and used by, the general public over the past 50 years has given me new perspectives on our health and healthcare (more realistically, sick-care). 

      I grew up using herbs and have personally experienced their beneficial effects.  I probably didn’t take any drugs for anything until I was in my teens.  There was no reason to, because I was seldom sick, probably due to the absence of synthetic drugs in my body at that time which would otherwise wreak havoc to my immune system.  We never used disinfectant wipes, ate antibiotic-laden meat, or had doctors give us antibiotics whenever we had a cold.  But one thing I distinctly remember when I got the flu (Asian flu pandemic 1967-68) at college in Taiwan after watching a track meet in light-rainy weather without an umbrella for hours.  I was in bed for 2 weeks and lost 20 pounds that I didn’t gain back until years after I was married.  While in bed lying down, I was fine and could chat with my roommates with no problem.  But when I tried to sit up, my head began to spin, which went away as soon as I lay down again.  I assume I was given some modern drugs.  But the most memorable is what they gave me to relieve my terrible cough.  It was an extract of jiegeng (root of Platycodon grandiflorum or balloon flower) made in our school dispensary in glass percolators.  After taking that, my cough went away overnight. 

      Then decades later, while I was sourcing Siberian ginseng (eleuthero) and Schisandra in northeastern China for one of my products, guided by my supplier-friends, Sammy Ma and his brother, I came across jiegeng again, this time as a dish of root vegetable at one of our dinners there.  This just shows us that the origin of our medicine often has a common root with food.  Our age-old experience with it through trial-and-error guarantees it as safe and effective.  Unfortunately, many of us have forgotten our root.  Instead of producing safe and nontoxic drugs, we have somehow created the vicious cycle, that generates side effects and new diseases for the general public but is a perpetual money-making machine for pharmaceutical companies and their associates with total impunity, no matter what they produce.  How depressing!

In my next post, I’ll tell you my plan to address the following issues: (1) expose fake herbal supplements without herbs, so that consumers can avoid those and switch to genuine ones; (2) modernized natural remedies with safe-use records that are accompanied by meaningful fingerprints of identity and quality; and (3) more natural chemical drugs, and how to avoid their synthetic counterparts.

Toxicity of synthetic drugs vs. natural chemicals

Natural chemicals have always been with us since human life began. We might not know them but they are in the foods we eat and the herbs we ingest when we are ill. 

Synthetic chemicals are made mostly from petroleum chemicals.  We have no long history of intimate contact with them and don’t know whether or not they are edible or poisonous.

We know two chemicals with the same chemical structure are indeed the same chemical, whether they are synthetic or natural.  However, the synthetic chemicals are mostly made from brand-new ones.  Even though some may have been synthesized from natural compounds, their final product and the various intermediates as well as byproducts formed during the synthetic process, are brand new.  When we attempt to purify the end product, we try to remove as much as possible these brand-new, potentially very toxic, intermediates and byproducts.  Despite our advanced scientific technologies, I am not aware of our being able to remove every single molecule of these unwanted compounds we call impurities, from our drugs.  Nor do I know of any drug-development organizations testing the toxicity of every one of these impurities as they do with drugs.  If I am wrong, would someone knowledgeable please correct me?

                      With natural chemicals, we don’t have this problem, because whatever impurities present have already been there with the isolated chemical since antiquity, before and after it is extracted.  Take psilocybin, for example, other compounds (such as psilocin, baeocystin & norbaeocystin, among others) may already be present, before and after the psilocybin is isolated from the mushroom. 

                      However, in synthetic psilocybin, whatever compounds present with it as impurities, are brand new to this planet.  Thus, its safety is totally unknown.

                      Incidentally, no chemical, natural or synthetic, is 100.00% pure except theoretically. In practice, the percentage of impurities allowed in pharmacopoeias such as the USP, range from maybe 1% to 10% or higher.  The lower level usually is reserved for synthetics and the higher one reserved for naturals. I am not sure if those levels have been set because USP scientists knew synthetics are unknown hence their safety too, so restrict it to a lower limit; but natural chemicals are present along with our foods and herbs since antiquity and hence have at least some safety record.  These numbers also make allowance for the precision of the measuring equipment used.  I know USP tests certain impurities in drugs, allowing them to be present in trace amounts.  But I don’t know if there are any human safety records for the impurities in synthetic drugs.  Does anyone knowledgeable in these matters know?

                      I don’t know about other drugs, but I believe psilocybin can be obtained by biotechnology, or simply stated, ‘fermentation.’  I spent 5 years in graduate school over 50 years ago developing the method which proves it is feasible.  My work has been published in several papers in scientific journals.  Whoever involved in this business with foresight and compassion for consumers, trying to afford them non-toxic psilocybin, can take up the project.  Years of preliminary R&D work can be eliminated.  In addition, baeocystin and norbaeocystin are an added bonus, because sooner or later these 2 compounds will be proven similar or even better than psilocybin in mental healthcare.  Good luck to you all! 

This post is primarily addressed to our younger folks who have not created the vicious cycle.   We the older generations are the ones who have done it or been brainwashed to believe in drugs and accept them.  Hence, we are of not much help to be in charge of breaking the vicious cycle for you, as it’d be like leaving the fox to guard the henhouse. 

Is the vicious cycle of toxic drugs anyone’s fault?

I believe it was negligence in the beginning.  We have been treating our body as a visually single entity after the modern drug era began over a century ago. Then, since the passage of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act in 1994, we have been treating (testing) herbal supplements/medicines using the wrong scientific technologies well established for chemical drugs, but not suitable for herbs.  Consequently, over the past several decades, the above two actions have skewed most, if not all, of the results of scientific research involving herbs, such as the identity and quality of herbal products.  These have led the mainstream drug scientists to declare traditional herbal therapy is anecdotal and unscientific, but modern drug therapy is ‘evidence-based’ and scientific.   However, both are not scientific.   These are already discussed and documented in my publications (print and online), especially those of the last three years.  If you have followed my newsletter or blog, you would probably realize I didn’t really piece together the connection between the identity and quality of herbal products, our body, and how the drug vicious cycle began to evolve when synthetic drugs entered our complex body to cause havoc, until about 16 years ago.   Therefore, I think the vicious cycle may not be anybody’s fault.  Unless the drug makers had already known about it decades earlier and kept it quiet until I happened to discover it. This interaction of drugs and our complex body causing major disturbances in it is described recently in the article “A Disruptive Concept in Drug Therapy” which you can find in its entirety on the April 2, 2019 post.           

However, after the first new drug, Valbenazine (Ingrezza), was approved on April 11, 2017, for treating the first drug-caused disease called Tardive Dyskinesia (involuntary body movements), I see it simply as a gift from our government, that means you and me, giving pharmaceutical companies a free hand to continue making toxic drugs with official sanction of their vicious cycle.  The drug scientists might not even have thought of it and how it came about, but on April 11, 2017, an amazing business opportunity fell on their lap, after decades of their priming of consumers and government health officials that we needed their ‘scientific’ drug therapy.   Yet no drugs, whether old or new, have ever been seriously held accountable, because no one honestly knew what was going to happen once these new drugs entered our body.  Our body does what it does since antiquity and we simply can’t control it.  Otherwise we would have all kinds of human health problems under control.  Instead, after decades of sophisticated scientific drug research, we have this vicious cycle and no idea what our body would do to a brand-new drug.  Do you think our scientists really have control of our drug-therapy process? We produce one drug for some illness, but we never know what it finally does, all depending on what our body makes it do, or not do, after it enters it.  For example, the drug Thalidomide was developed as a sedative and hypnotic but was found to be good also for respiratory infections as well as morning sickness.   After pregnant women using it and gave birth to babies with missing limps, hands, and other deformities (“Thalidomide babies”) in the 1960’s, it was removed from the market.  Then, only in recent years, it has been resurrected as a treatment for leprosy and cancer (multiple myeloma).  This strengthens my observation that modern drug therapy is not scientific.  It is just a trial-and-error process like the practice of traditional herbal medicine, except that all the impurities in herbs have been with us since human life began, while those in synthetic drugs are brand new.  With these brand-new chemicals, our real experience with them starts only after their 10-20 years of clinical trial, when they are approved for use in humans.  Incidentally, Thalidomde was supposed to be an immunomodulating drug.  A lot of Chinese tonic herbs have immunomodulating properties, such as astragalus and lycium (goji).  Could it be that Thalidomide was resurrected for treating multiple myeloma because of its immunomodulating properties exhibited in lab tests but never been shown in humans as with Chinese tonics?   

           Regardless, now we have a situation.  For millennia, we have needed and used herbs for our illnesses, and they have kept us alive and well.  Then, only in the short period of 200 years after the modern-drug era began, many of these herbal medicines have been discarded and rapidly replaced by modern synthetic chemicals.  The herbs (like foods) have been with us since human life began.  We know what is safe and what can kill from our long human-use experience. We don’t need to start testing them as with brand-new synthetic chemicals.  However, we have been artificially producing such chemicals from petrochemicals that we seldom, if ever, try to eat or drink, because they are most likely toxic to begin with.  The chemical/drug thus produced is always accompanied by other chemicals, such as reagents, intermediates, and byproducts from the synthetic process.  Even after purification trying to get rid of these, some of which still persist in small amounts as impurities in the ‘pure’ drug to cause trouble (see the previous post, 4^th Post).  Could Thalidomide’s toxic effects be due to its hidden impurities that caused the birth defects? 

While the vicious cycle appears to be nobody’s fault, the pharmaceutical companies certainly did not hide their greed after the first drug, Valbenazine (Ingrezza), was approved.  Its first owner wastes no time to take advantage of this official vicious cycle by charging each patient (ultimately our healthcare system) $200/day or $73,000/year.  Considering this new drug-caused disease occurring in more than 500,000 people in the US, imagine how much money this company will quietly take from us U.S. taxpayers yearly, with our implicit permission – tens of billion dollars!   This is just the beginning and only the first drug!  I don’t think the other drug makers will be less greedy, because after the vicious drug cycle was firmly established, it already has us trapped in it.   Our government, after so many decades of manipulation by the drug industry, does not know how to deal with it.  The politicians continue to pay lip service and bicker among themselves. They may not even know that this vicious cycle exists and expect future drugs to be better and not more toxic in intensity and in number.  The other politicians may simply think that businesses are entitled to decent profits, totally unaware that this is not a regular business.  We now have an industry that has a license to make and sell any drugs and charge us any prices they want with absolute impunity, whether or not these products work.  When some patient dies, they blame the death on anything but themselves and their drugs, and they can get away with it.  With any other products (cars, planes, home appliances, etc.) that have so many defects, resulting in hurting or killing people, or simply annoying them, they would be shunned by consumers and their manufacturers would be bankrupt in no time.  Yet, because of the complexity of drug development and therapy, involving common sense and different kinds of sciences, few if anyone in government have the training and experience to dare question the drug industry’s practice, especially when it deals with our health.  My generation and the one that follows have been bombarded by drug ads for 4 decades.  Many of us have been brain-washed by these ads to believe in drugs or at least find them not objectionable, especially when you consider our scientific advances in other medical areas, such as hip replacement, tooth implants, ‘bionic’ limbs, and other types of surgery that save lives, with dramatic and visible results.  

Few of us have the upbringing, training, and experience in diverse fields to recognize what is wrong with our drug-therapy system.  I have been in this field for over 55 years, yet I didn’t see anything wrong with drugs myself until only about 16 years ago.  I believe you, our younger folks, should know about this so that I can help you break this vicious cycle before it will be too late.

 I have a young granddaughter.  I want her and other young people to grow up to have a true natural alternative to this vicious cycle of only toxic drugs which gives the drug industry absolutely no incentive to produce safer, cheaper and better drugs.  The two things that I most worry for you, which you will inherit from us, are: (1) our ruined (or about to be ruined) environment; and (2) the toxic vicious drug cycle.  Neither is due to any fault of yours.  Both are caused by the greed of a minute percentage of our older generations.    Because of our current dysfunctional, and sometimes downright corrupt political system, I don’t trust my own generation, or the next, to solve either problem for you.   Since I am no expert in environmental matters, I hope someone else would help you with our environment.  But I’ll try my best to break the toxic vicious cycle for you so that you won’t be stuck forever with only toxic drug therapy. 

I am a private person.  Seldom, if ever, have I engaged in self-promotion.  This is the first time I openly ask you to at least lend moral support to my project, even though it is really for the benefit of your generations, including the grandchildren of my generation and theirs.  I plan on using 75% of the gross profits from the sales of my 2 latest books, and one more on its way, to start a nonprofit to work towards breaking the vicious cycle and to afford true natural alternatives to the current toxic drugs. I am an herbal scientist, experienced in the quality and  manufacture of herbal products, among other things.  So, I’m not just talking.   I am simply asking you to spread the word on my books, buy one of them if you can, and tell others about them

Also, I especially need the help of you millennial folks (teens to 40’s), for your savviness in social media to spread the word.  You are the ones who will inherit this earth from us, hopefully still not totally ruined.  This vicious cycle is time-sensitive.  As time goes on, it continues to remove from you what limited potential alternatives that are still left, simultaneously adding more toxic drugs that continue to cause new diseases.  In another 20 years, you would have no alternatives but toxic drug therapy at whatever prices demanded by a few ‘gazillionaires’ who would perpetuate and control this vicious cycle that to them, is a self-generating money machine that we have unwittingly gifted them.

This fight will be yours.  But I have faith in you after seeing a sample of your strength and intelligence following the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida.  Hang in there!  I believe your generation can do it!

In my next post, the 6^th on this same series, I’ll describe how we can save traditional herbal medicines as alternatives and/or complementary medicines to toxic drugs and how the vicious cycle can be broken.  Also, natural drugs can stay natural as some of them can be produced by biotechnology, not via chemical synthesis of unknown chemicals never before existed on our planet.

1. See 3rd post.
2. Natural therapeutics (herbs, foods, etc.).  They include natural materials from plants, animals, minerals, and microbes (mushrooms included), among others.  But they don’t include drugs produced by synthesis which invariably carry with them toxic impurities that include intermediates, toxic reagents, and/or byproducts that are hidden in the ‘pure’ chemical drugs, normally expressed as 98% to 102% purity, which is never 100.00% pure.  I have discussed the issue of toxic impurities hidden in modern synthetic drugs in my books and other writings, such as online, on my blog.   I don’t believe these impurities (no matter in what quantities present) have ever been tested in humans.  If you have contrary information, I’d love to hear from you. These might have been tested on receptors or small animals, and then the results were projected onto humans.  Testing them on some isolated receptors, chemicals, or cells in vivo certainly doesn’t translate onto our living and extremely organized and well-functioning body.  This reminds me of Dr. Albert Hofmann.   He was the famous chemist at Sandoz of Switzerland who, 50 years ago, was the first to have isolated the hallucinogen, psilocybin, from a Magic Mushroom of Mexico.  At the time I was a graduate student at Michigan, Ann Arbor, working on cultivating a North American hallucinogenic mushroom (Psilocybe baeocystis) in submerged culture and isolating 2 new sister compounds of psilocybin from its fungal tissue, whose chemical structures I determined and named baeocystin & norbaeocystin.   I met Dr. Hofmann a couple of times at meetings or conferences and remember his story of trying a tiny little bit of a synthetic compound that he had synthesized, shortly before he went home one day.  That chemical was LSD!  He certainly had an unexpected trip riding home on his bicycle that day!   What I am trying to say is there are two major systems of discovering and developing therapeutics – the scientific but uncertain way and the human empirical, trial-and-true way.  What Dr. Hofmann took was maybe only micrograms of LSD, but that would be enough to give him a trip.  The chemical (ergotamine) from which he synthesized the LSD is a drug for migraine and related headaches used in doses of a few milligrams (or thousands of micrograms) each time.  The LSD made from it has much stronger effects in a different way, not necessarily in relieving migraine.  I believe the in vitro and in vivo testing microcosm won’t be able to predict that effect, nor will it work as well as actual human experience.  Only time will tell.  However, for natural therapeutics, our herbs and foods have already gone through the tried-and-true process.   The fact that we know what herbs or foods are safe to eat should serve as evidence that the process for natural therapeutics is far ahead of the modern ‘scientific’ process.    For synthetic drugs, we won’t have the verdict for who knows how long, decades, centuries, or millennia?  Shouldn’t we reset our thinking in modern drug discovery and development?  And start looking at traditional medicines that have already gone through the process, not just for 2 or 3 decades, but for millennia?  Using natural therapeutics can start to complement our current toxic drugs and help mitigate their toxic effects.  To my drug colleagues, please point out what you see as wrong in my thinking in terms of science and common sense.  To be clear and impartial in your thinking, please temporarily step outside the vicious cycle of drugs (which financially benefits only the greedy) and put yourself in the shoes of the health- and financially oppressed public.  

          There are two subgroups of natural therapeutics within the herb/food domain.  They are tonics and fashi or fawu (or food ‘taboos’).  Many people outside of China may have heard of tonic herbs, but few may know what they mean.  Tonic herbs are loosely defined as natural materials, mostly botanicals, that double as both medicine and food, depending on usage.  Thus, ginseng tea (Asian or American) can be drunk either as a medicine or simply as a beverage.  Same with astragalus root, goji berries, Schisandra berries, and danggui (Chinese angelica root).  They can be taken as medicine or as food.  From modern research performed over recent decades, these tonic herbs all have some the following biological functions – antioxidant, immune-system modulating, anti-inflammatory, and anti-allergic, among others.  These and their formulas have been often described in my latest book, My Life & Rollercoaster Career.  

      The other subgroup consists of mostly foods and tonic herbs that are generally used as foods with certain other specific foods.  While my sisters and I were growing up under Grandma’s traditional medical care, we learned the very basics of Chinese medicine, including cooling versus warming herbs, yin versus yang herbs, detoxifying herbs, tonic herbs, and what to use in warm or qi-deficient conditions, among others.   There are some herbs and foods that should not be used with one another.  For a more detailed description, read pp. 228-229 of my My Life & Rollercoaster Career (from my newsletter, Issue 5, January 1997) reproduced below:        

 

A NOTE FROM DR. LEUNG

One of the things I learned while growing up in a cosmopolitan city like Hong Kong is the contrast between East and West in treating illnesses. We learned early on that illnesses are closely related to our diet. When we are ill, we need to watch what we take into our body. For example, according to Cantonese tradition, if one has a fever or a “hot” condition (such as canker sores, blood-shot eyes, bad breath and dry and hoarse throat), one should avoid warming foods or herbs, such as lamb, beef, Asian ginseng, chili pepper, cinnamon, and other strong spices. On the other hand, cooling foods or herbs are just what one needs for such a condition, which include American ginseng, watercress, kudzu root, mung bean, and bean curd. In contrast, when one is treated by modern Western medicine, except on extremely rare occasions, one is allowed to eat anything because modern medicine does not believe in food taboos as they have no “scientific” rationale. Since I have grown up in a traditional Chinese environment and received a solid Western scientific education, I have always been torn between tradition and science regarding this issue. We rarely took any modern drugs while we were growing up but on the few occasions that I did, I wholeheartedly endorsed the Western way because it allowed me to eat my favorite foods. I was certainly guilty of expediency. But I was young. For a long while, up until several years after I obtained my doctorate, I leaned towards modern medicine, even though all the time my traditional upbringing was prominent in the back of my mind. Then, as I learned more about the deficiencies of modern medicine and of drug treatment, the voice of my background and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) started to speak louder to me. Now, I am convinced that both conventional Western medicine and TCM have strong points and weak points and they can coexist to serve us well. Nevertheless, I have a healthy skepticism towards both systems, especially when proponents of each often try to outdo the other. But in reality, there is no need to do so, as there is plenty of room for each to exercise its good. Getting back to food taboos. I think it won’t hurt for one to be open minded about it. Here is a little “scientific evidence” I recently came across in my files to support food taboos.³⁰ It is by no means a quality report, but the results intrigued me.

In a brief report from the Department of Surgery of Jiaxing Municipal No. 1 Hospital of Zhejiang Province, the incidence of postoperative infection was evaluated among 4,357 patients who underwent surgery between 1978 and 1982. Among the 2,171 patients who observed food taboos, i.e., eating only mild and plain foods and not eating so-called fashi or fawu (nutritious foods that cause the “flare up” of certain diseased conditions, such as chicken soup, fish, shrimp, crab, mutton, green onions, and jiucai or Allium odorum), only 71 had infections. In contrast, among the 2,186 patients who maintained a normal diet after surgery, 191 had experienced infections. The difference was almost threefold! I personally think it is worthwhile to investigate this type of food taboo further in a more controlled manner. And I don’t think it is difficult to design a good protocol for this either. After all, the terms fashi and fawu are not recently made-up terms; they have been around for centuries, a result of practical human experience with diet and diseases.³¹ According to Chinese diet taboos, “nutritious” foods (yes, chicken soup included!) do not necessarily suit all occasions; some actually aggravate certain diseased conditions. This is something modern nutritionists should heed.

---

30.  J .J. Ying et al., “The Clinical Significance of Food Taboos in Surgery,” Zhongxiyi Jiehe Zazhi, 5(7): 439(1985).

31.  J Huang, “Preliminary Evaluation of Fawu,” Zhongguo Zhongyao Zazhi, 17(9): 563-565(1992).

The three key elements of therapy

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

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

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

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

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

Any Therapy Must Involve Our Body

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Background

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted 4/25/19  –  7:29pm

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

Berberine as a dietary (chemical) supplement?

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

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

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

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

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

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

20190412