#ThanksAmerica #ADHD #absentminded #flunkedoutofschool #TCM #viciouscycle #toxicdrugs #herbalsupplements #herbalmedicine #ThanksUSA #grandchildren #teachers #BigPharma

In my newest books, scattered in appropriate places, I have already thanked my family, my friends from childhood to college, and at work, without whom I would not have become what I am today.  Now I want to specifically thank my adopted country, the USA, for welcoming me 57 years ago.   I was born into an erudite family on both my paternal and maternal sides.  As far as I can remember, as a child up to perhaps 8 or 9 years old, I was absentminded and daydreaming a lot.   I flunked out of elementary school and then later in my sophomore year of high school.  My anchor at home was my maternal grandmother, my amah (nanny), and my older sister who was my protector against bullies when I was younger.  My father was not around during most of those years and my mother was mostly our disciplinarian.  I feel very blessed and lucky I were not born now or a generation or two earlier.  Under the premise for children to have better attention to learn, they are given drugs to take so that they could pay attention.  With my condition (ADHD?), in any other family, I would probably have been given drugs to take to make me focus and easier for the teachers, and of course heavily promoted by Big Pharma & associates to line their own pockets.  I would have been deep in the vicious cycle forever.  Please help me break it so that our grandchildren and theirs would not inherit it!

The following is the last paragraph of “Chapter 1.  Growing Up in Asia” of “My Life & Rollercoaster Career…” published last year in August. 

Looking back at my childhood-to-college years in Asia, I feel very lucky under those circumstances. I somehow ended up finishing high school and college and was going to start a new life in America. First, being admitted to the graduate school of the University of Michigan was not easy with academic records of barely a B-average like mine. And then, being offered a teaching assistantship sight unseen was to me like a miracle. I didn’t realize how lucky I was at the time, but I do now. Without the financial support of Uncle Siu and Auntie Pauline, I would not have gone to college, period, let alone finished it with a Bachelor of Science degree in Pharmacy. And without the teaching assistantship from Michigan, I would not have become a pharmacognosist, specializing in herbal medicine, writing to you today, trying to tell you and the world about what is wrong with our drugs and ‘herbal’ supplements. They can be made much better if we start doing something about them, especially by resetting our priorities towards the less fortunate by forgoing at least part of the excessive profits.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It seems obvious the technical reviewers at that time (33 years ago) already recognized the value of my new ideas to not just looking blindly at chemicals but also at the true value of traditional medicines.  The current situation is not that much different, as the benefits of time-tested remedies have never been properly evaluated even up to now.  Regardless, after witnessing this kind of nepotism politics that I detest, I have avoided socializing with people in industry, academia, and government who are known to be a part of this.  And which is also why I didn’t apply to any government agencies for any grants for over 13 years until in 2000 when a friend and colleague alerted me to an RFP for an SBIR grant from NCCAM for feverfew research.  I took that as a chance to prove my correct approach to research on complex herbs.   We applied and won the grant for both Phases I & II.   Some of the research results were used in the development of our Phyto-True System.  [A.Y. Leung, Tradition- and science-based quality control of traditional Chinese medicine – introducing the Phyto-True system, J. AOAC International 93 (5): 1355-1366 (2010)]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breaking the vicious cycle and introducing natural options to its toxic synthetic drugs

A Reminder:  Drugs can be scientifically produced. But when they enter our body in the drug-therapy process, it is not scientific; which is why they always have side effects.  The details have been discussed in the 9^th post and elsewhere.

Breaking the vicious cycle of toxic drug therapy is one thing.  Trying to provide alternatives to replace it is another.  At present, there are basically two therapeutic systems that involve the healing agent and our body.  One is traditional medicine, using natural materials from herbs, minerals, animals, etc. and introduce them into our body.  The other is modern drug therapy, using, instead, synthetic chemicals or those taken from plants out-of-context.  These two therapies and our body’s involvement have already been discussed earlier.

In this post, I want to highlight the roles of our body and time and how we can break the vicious cycle to minimize its toxic effects.

Our body has a mind of its own, literally and figuratively.  It seems to play a central role in drug therapy and determines whether or not a drug will work and how toxic, along with the passage of time.  Thus, our body plus time are the two essential elements in the therapeutic process, whether or not the healing agent is an herb or a chemical.  Both are things we can’t control.  How scientific is a process like that, in which we have two uncontrollable key elements? 

      Here is a question I want to again pose to my esteemed colleagues with expertise in this and related fields:  If my premise on the human body and the passage of time is not correct, why then, after 80 years of intensive R&D in drug discovery and development, with so many advanced scientific technologies and achievements in biological, medical, and pharmaceutical fields at our disposal, we still have no clue how to make drugs that work which have no serious side effects?  Instead, we rely on statistics and risk-benefit analysis.

      I know you may not have an answer.  But if you agree with my   assessment of the situation or think I am at least close to the fact, we can have a common platform on which to start meaningful discussions on the vicious cycle.    Because drug therapy and herb therapy are closely related to each other and their daily practice impacts the health and finances of most of the world’s population, resolving this toxicity issue would benefit world health that we have never seen before.  We should give it a try at least for the benefit of our children, grandchildren, and theirs.  In my opinion, unless we change our entrenched thinking, we’ll never resolve our current dilemma of being supposedly the most scientifically advanced society in the world, yet we can’t produce drugs without serious side effects that beget new diseases leading to our vicious cycle, formally established two years ago.  The key lies not in more so-called evidence-based lab testing, but on actual human clinical experience over time

Since both therapies have their weaknesses, we need to reset our thinking and start reviewing both with openness and objectivity.  Once the open dialog has begun, I believe we can find ways to minimize the effects of the dictates of our body and time with help from the already tried-and-true herbal experiences, including herbal supplements/medicines and natural chemicals.

Twenty-five years after DSHEA was passed in 1994, there are still many mislabeled herbal supplements on the market, like those with only standardized chemicals in a base of inert carriers.  These should be exposed.  They can then be relabeled simply and appropriately as “dietary” or “chemical” supplements. The true herbal supplements/medicines should have fingerprints to show what they actually contain, as labeled, time after time.   So far, no one is doing it for various reasons, no matter how big and well known the brands.

      My first action will be to analyze suspicious commercial herbal supplements as soon as I get enough public support.  If you agree with what I say, please show your support by clicking “Like,” post a short comment, or send me a message.  I am not yet set up to receive support other than these.  However, when I am ready, I’ll let you know.  I plan on using 75% of the gross profits of my two new books (with another on its way) to start a nonprofit for this endeavor.             There is much more to be done.  But as long as I am still clear-minded and physically and mentally active, I’ll continue blogging as long as it takes, to get my message across.  I believe there are overwhelmingly more decent people in the world like you and me than a handful of cheaters, liars, and greedy exploiters who now happen to be running it.  These decent folks are the ones I want to reach and I believe most of you are, though some may not even know that this vicious cycle exists.  Our grandchildren and theirs, when trapped by it 20 or 30 years from now, will also have no idea it was created by us over the past decades due to our negligence, greed, or nonchalant attitude.

Se parece que no hay drogas no toxicas.  Estas causan enfermedades nuevas que necesitan mas nuevas drogas para tratar.  Estas a su vez causan mas enfermedades  en un ciclo vicioso.  Este es malo para el publico general, sino muy rentable para la industria farmacéutica.  Ademas, es sensible al tiempo.  En 20 o 30 anos, se iran las alternativas naturales.  Lo que quedaran para Uds serán las drogas toxicas del ciclo vicioso.  Hay mucha gente en America que hablan o leen español.  Por favor, reenvien este mensaje a sus amigos, sean jóvenes o viejos, para diseminar la palabra.  Es para la salud futura de Uds!   Con cariño!  Alberto    

Essential facts and premises for understanding the DISRUPTIVE CONCEPT

These have been discussed in my previous eight posts.  This 9^th post is a summary of them as well as on what has been discussed in my recent books, Newsletter, LinkedIn, my blog (www.ayslcorp.com/blog), and elsewhere.  Here they are:

• Drugs are pure chemicals whose identity and quality can be guaranteed by analytical methods well established specifically for chemicals. 

• Herbs are multichemical entities like foods.  The existing scientific technologies are not appropriate for testing them, unless you assume one or more of these chemicals to fully represent the traditional properties and actions of these herbs/foods.  In that case, we may as well consider caffeine to be coffee and ignore other also-important chemicals like chlorogenic acid (an antioxidant), among many others also present.  Because we have been using the wrong assumptions on coffee and other herbs/foods, and unknowingly applying the wrong sciences in evaluating them, much of the published ‘scientific’ data on herbs is wrong or irrelevant, and hence useless for evaluating the efficacy and safety of the traditional medicines concerned.  For this main reason, I did not revise the 3^rd edition of my “Leung’s Encyclopedia of Common Natural Ingredients used in Food, Drugs, and Cosmetics” published by Wiley in 2010.

• Our body is extremely complex.  Each cell contains myriad chemicals that function independently, and in concert, as well as in communication with other cells in different parts of our body to become an extremely complex, organized, and well-functioning multicellular organism with a mind and memory of its own.  When a brand-new synthetic chemical drug enters our body, it has to try to get to whatever targeted receptor, chemical, or cell that we assume causes us the problem, hoping it would neutralize this target, and make us well again.   It has to get there with no divine guidance, just our hope for it not to bump into too many of these other billions of living chemicals and cells in its path to cause havoc, hence side effects.  It seems the ‘science’ of drug therapy is nothing but letting the drug go through the trial-and-error process as traditional natural medicine had gone through eons ago.  And there doesn’t seem to be any shortcuts in human testing either, but to wait to see what actually would happen, decades, centuries, or even millennia from now.  That’s why time-tested herbs and formulas, by inference, should be safer than synthetics, and are as effective in countering the cause of any illness, should any particular modern drugs happen to also do that, besides plugging symptoms.

• During my decades of involvement in ‘scientific’ research and manufacture of herbal products, I finally realized around 16 years ago that a modern drug can be prepared by the most advanced scientific technologies in the world, but once it enters our complex body, it’s nothing but trial and error in a world of organized chaos.  This is no different than what happened at the beginning of traditional herbal medicine when our ancestors started using herbs, thousands or countless years ago. 

With the above information, we are now ready to deal with the following two main issues: 

1. Interrupt the vicious cycle of toxic drugs and introduce/reintroduce the neglected natural therapeutics that have been with us since our human species began on this earth, as alternatives or replacements for modern toxic drugs.
2. How to start doing the above.

In my next post, the 10th, I’ll address the modernization of herbal supplements and their reintroduction into commerce along with new natural chemical drugs, also called dietary supplements.   Then in my final 11^th post, the process of setting up nonprofit and for-minimal-profit organizations will be considered geared at trying to afford such products as a competition and alternative to modern drugs, stressing their safety, identity, and quality.

Alberto Leung

El cicle vicioso

Les agradezco por ser en mis conexiones de LinkedIn y por visitar mi blog.  Espero que les gusten mis publicaciones.  Estoy planeando interrumpir el cicle vicioso de drogas toxicas que hemos creado para nuestros nietos y los suyos en el futuro.  Quiero introducir medicinas naturales seguras que son modernizadas científicamente por ciencia apropiada para complementar o sustituir las drogas toxicas sintéticas.  Ellas van a ser disponibles con prueba de identidad y calidad como huellas dactilares significativos.  Nos van a permitir una mejor salud natural. Visiten los posts en mi blog sobre “A Disruptive Concept in Drug Therapy.”  Por favor, ayúdenme diseminar la palabra entre sus amigos y colegas de habla española.  Gracias!  Deseandoles lo mejor de la salud natural!   AYL

#ciclevicioso #sinteticas #drogas #toxicas #huellas #dactilares

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.