Dr. Albert Y. Leung

Chinese healthcare products maker Quanjian under investigation over girl’s death in 2015

From South China Morning Post, Dec 28, 2018.

What Quanjian has done really hits home for me.   It sets back my efforts in trying to modernize and legitimize Chinese medicine in world health care for who knows how long.  I published my 2 recent books only months ago, which finally put my life, thoughts, and accomplishments on record.  And only weeks ago, I started blogging in earnest.  My ideas on modern drugs and herbal supplements are not ordinary; they are disruptive.  They can radically change health care for the general population.  Instead of the current modern, but expensive, toxic drug therapy for just the privileged few, a new class of tried-and-true natural therapeutics, derived from millennia of human experience, can be provided to the general population at affordable cost.  They will financially impact the drug developers, makers, sellers, prescribers, and users of conventional drugs.  And the dietary (herbal) supplement industry will have to undergo a readjustment before starting to provide affordable natural therapeutics to an increasing population as a true alternative to current toxic drugs.

This news about Quanjian’s providing ‘ancient’ or ‘secret’ Chinese cures for treating cancer reinforces the negative (‘charlatan’) image of Chinese medicine in peoples around the world who don’t know about it or have never experienced its beneficial effects.  Because of this, it’s much more difficult for me now to explain how drugs and traditional medicines work in our body, irrespective of how and from where they originate.  And this is just the scientific and traditional part.  The other, and more difficult part is how to change greed in those who constitute a small minority of our population yet holds the money and power to maintain the vicious cycle that negatively affects the rest of us.  But it is a self-generating, perpetual money-machine for this minority.  Regardless, I still believe in the decency in the majority of our population.  I believe the only way to counter greed is to remove the money incentives for drug makers and their interdependent associates by breaking the vicious cycle.  For that, we need to enlist the consumers and honest politicians.

In my last post, I urged herbalists and herbal scientists to come together.  I hope you have listened to my call.  I have plans to start first with the identity and quality of true herbal supplements, which I have advocated for decades.  I need your help to spread the word together with me.  There are already interested like-minded parties willing to work with me, not to exploit our healthcare system, but to give fellow consumers an affordable alternative.

20190111

To all herbalists and herbal scientists!!
We must join forces to prevent this from happening!

A colleague and friend, Roy Upton, recently sent me a chapter he had written for a book titled, “Evidence-Based Validation of Herbal Medicine” published by Elsevier Inc. in 2015. It is Chapter 3, Traditional Herbal Medicine, Pharmacognosy, and Pharmacopoeial Standards: A Discussion at the Crossroads. That is a detailed account of a historical look at the diverse field of pharmacognosy. If you have time and patience, I recommend it, though I can’t guarantee that you would get a clear idea of what pharmacognosy actually is, after reading it.
I have tried my best to explain “pharmacognosy” in the Preface of my Memoir and in pp. 428-431 under “Pharmacognosy Revisited” of my dual book, “My Life & Rollercoaster Career.” But the subject is so broad and complex that it is not easy to narrow it down to a single word or phrase. From both Roy’s and my attempts to describe it, I have come to the conclusion that, after millennia of evolution from traditional herbal medicine to the science of pharmacognosy (broadly, the study of natural drugs) and with a heavy dose of drug influence, pharmacognosy in the West is now nothing but drug discovery and development. Decades of my personal training and experience in traditional Chinese medicine, along with Roy’s description of how pharmacopoeial standards evolved over time, have led me to the following realization of the plight of herbal medicine:

1. Despite the detailed pharmacopoeial standards set for raw herbs, from the originally basic organoleptic (e.g., morphologic & sensory), microscopic, simple physicochemical testing, to the more advanced, genetic, and finally, precise chemical requirements, the last (i.e., chemical) alone has triggered the demise of herbal medicine. Under current ‘modern’ herbal practice, once a so-called active chemical, among countless others, is identified in an herb and assigned to be its marker of identity and quality, you don’t need any of the other non-chemical standards anymore, unless your final product is a formula of raw powdered herbs. This has been the industry practice for at least 20 years.
2. With the above rationale, most commercial herbal products/supplements are probably standardized to a particular chemical marker, but contain no herbal elements. This is because, as far as I know, there are still no standards for finished commercial herbal supplements, despite the existence of copious nonchemical pharmacopoeial standards for the raw herb ingredients.
3. The main reason we are in our current status quo is that, as scientific herbal experts, we have been confused since day one after the passage of DSHEA in 1994. We regulate herbs as food, yet we continue to analyze them as drugs, using the wrong drug-oriented technology and expect the results to meet drug standards. Obviously, this would not happen as it is no different than analyzing chlorogenic acid in echinacea or in coffee, and call that chemical echinacea or coffee. Because of this scenario, traditional herbs have never been properly studied or their therapeutic values validated. Most, if not all, such studies have used the wrong pharmaceutical approach specifically designed and established for simple chemical drugs, which is not suitable for complex herbs and foods.

In the quality control of drugs, we need standards, such as pure aspirin in aspirin work; and not just another painkiller like morphine. But with complex, multichemical herbs, there are no simple standards for them. Most herb standards (aka reference materials) are based on some specific chemical(s) in the herbs, assumed to represent the herbs. They are not true standards, only based on assumption or wishful thinking, which is neither science nor tradition. At the present time, the closest to true herbal standards is the Representative Botanical Reference Material (RBRM) of our Phyto-True system (see an earlier post). With this RBRM, appropriate results from herbal research or analysis can now be achievable. The P-T system was developed as a byproduct of a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant of $1.4 million awarded to my company, Phyto-Technologies, Inc., in 2001 by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Health (NCCAM), NIH. And its RBRM was recently granted a European patent.

Posted January 6, 2019

Synthetic Drugs versus Traditional Herbal Medicines

 Two Different Systems of Therapy

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

 

20181231

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

A.Y. Leung

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

A.Y.  Leung (Alberto)

Medicines don’t have to be expensive or cause new diseases that require new drugs to treat, thus perpetuating the vicious cycle.  If you think I am too harsh on modern drugs, please tell me why, but only after you have read and understood what I have written in my recent books.  You may consider me naïve, and I may be blunt, but I am no pathological liar.  Please read my books.  If you are an intelligent and/or a compassionate human being, you’ll most likely agree with me.  And buy my book(s) too if you think the world needs more kindness and less politics, especially in science and health.  Help me try to break the vicious cycle of modern drugs and to disrupt the misapplication of the wrong sciences on natural medicines.  I need a lot of help because I am up against the second most powerful political force in the U.S.A. next to the NRA!  Except guns kill fast and synthetic drugs slowly!

Here is something simple to take care of a painful problem.  Like drugs, it may not work for everyone.  But at least it wouldn’t cause a toxic side effect that might end up as a new disease either.  Furthermore, there are no incentives here for anyone to make money out of you and me!

It’s walnut for urinary stones and gallstones!   The recipes are described in my “Chinese Herbal Remedies” aka “Chinese Healing Foods and Herbs” that has been translated into German “Chinesische Heilkrἃuter (Diederichs Gelbe Reihe, publisher).”  These are also described in my newest book “My Life & Rollercoaster Career” on p. 204.

 

HEALING FOODS

Walnut.  Reports on its use to treat urinary stones (kidney, bladder, etc.) have occasionally appeared over the past forty years.  I first reported this use in my Chinese Healing Foods and Herbs (pp. 167-168).  Now I have come across another use in a recent issue of a popular health journal [Jiankang Zhinang, 38(2): 45(1996)].  This time it was used for gallbladder stone.  After simply eating 4 to 10 walnuts daily without interruption for 6 months, the patient had no more symptoms (abdominal pain and distention, nausea and vomiting, chills, fever, etc.).  Also, physical examination revealed that the stone was no longer present.  Before this self-treatment, the patient had been treated by conventional methods for a whole year without much relief.  For people who have urinary or gallstones, it certainly won’t hurt to give walnut a try.

There is another recipe on p. 252 of “My Life & Rollercoaster Career” which also describes the use of Job’s tears for the same problem.  There, for urinary stone, it only would take days instead of months for gallbladder stone.

There are over 100 recipes described in my newsletter in the above book.  I have already marked them for publication in a new book, probably 160 to 180 pages.  These are Chinese herbal remedies reported in Chinese journals throughout China.  They are not from a figment of my imagination or plagiarized from someone else’s work.  This plagiarism is described in my book on pages 220-222 and 263-264.  Sadly, the publisher for the plagiarized work is well-known.

For decades I have advocated and worked towards proper standards for traditional herbal medicines.  These efforts and disruptive concepts/technologies are described in my books.

Now, 10 years after our patent application, “System and Method for Assessing Traditional Medicines” was submitted detailing our Phyto-True System, a European patent (EP 2 185 167 B1) was finally granted, published on July 4, 2018, EPO Bulletin 2018/27. The key part of our Phyto-True system patented is the Representative Botanical Reference Materials (RBRM) aka Phyto-True Reference Materials (PTRM).  These are the basic herbal standards required for properly investigating traditional medicines, especially Chinese herbs.  Without them, traditional medicines cannot be evaluated properly, yielding irreproducible results and hence controversies whenever herbal medicines are studied using misapplied technologies specifically developed for chemical drugs.

I thank my co-inventor Greg Pennyroyal and my former technical team at Phyto-Technologies, Inc. (including Darin Smith, Heather Conway, Shannon Ehlers, David Hansen, and Pat Mettler) for their contribution.  This patent is a byproduct resulting from an SBIR grant for feverfew research from the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), now renamed National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH), with me as Principal Investigator and Dennis Awang, PhD, as Co-Principal Investigator.

I also want to thank my associates, Jan Matyska and Vaclav Tomek of PhytoCZ of the Czech Republic for their faith in our technology and their perseverance in pursuing the patenting of this technology.

 

RBRM for initially a dozen Chinese herbs are available from:   www.chromadex.com

RBRM for more Chinese herbs will also be soon available from:             www.ichemtesting.com.

 

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My Life & Rollercoaster Career

by

Albert Y. Leung, PhD

This book is two books in one, the author’s Memoir and his Newsletter published between 1996 and 2004.   Born with a mental handicap, Dr. Leung grew up in Hong Kong and China in a traditional Chinese medical environment.  He flunked out of the same school twice, but somehow managed to graduate from another high school in Hong Kong with honors and earned a Pharmacy degree in Taiwan, before going to the University of Michigan on a teaching assistantship to pursue graduate studies in Pharmacognosy (study of natural medicines).  Since then, he has been a chemist, microbiologist, salesman-entrepreneur, Chinese herbalist, botanical research scientist, herbal supplement manufacturer, and author.  For at least 8 years while in print, his Newsletter reached many movers and shakers in the herbal and associated industries.  In 2011, he was awarded an Alumni Lifetime Achievement Award for the scientific advancement of herbal medicine from his Alma Mater, the College of Pharmacy, the University of Michigan.

For the first time, Dr. Leung wants to alert the general public to two issues in modern health care:  (1) the vicious cycle of synthetic toxic drugs and (2) mislabeled dietary supplements often sold as herbal supplements.

Synthetic drugs all have toxic side effects some of which become new diseases requiring more drugs to treat, causing a persistent vicious cycle. At the same time, many herbal supplements are not really herbal but chemical, in a base of excipients (carriers and fillers) labeled as ‘herbal’ supplements.  Both unnecessarily have been draining much of our financial resources.

He proposes practical solutions to improve or replace them.

Available on www.amazon.com:  My Life & Rollercoaster Career – 550 pages, $25.95

The Life of a Pharmacognosist – 213 pages, $16.00

My Life & Rollercoaster Career is also available in Kindle – $5.49

 

Something for you to ponder:

Over decades, I have been openly critical of both the drug and herbal supplement industries.  Only in the last 15 years have I started to realize that for over a hundred years since the modern drug era began, we have never paid much attention to our body while doing drug development and therapy.    The body is just there.  Initially we might have viewed it as a single entity, then, as time went by, we might also notice that a man’s body is physically and chemically somewhat different from that of a woman, or an adult’s from a child’s, or a white man’s from that of a black man.  However, despite this, we have never acted on those observations.  So, in drug therapy, we treat our bodies simply as equal entities, yours is the same as mine.  But they are not!  The human body is simultaneously complex and organized.  It’s not too different from regulating herbs as food per the DSHEA passed in October 1994, yet up to the present we have never treated them properly as food, only as drugs, using technologies only suitable for drugs.

The reason why synthetic drugs are often toxic can be visualized as follows.  No matter how scientifically a drug is developed, once it enters our extremely complex and organized body, it meets billions of chemicals, cells, and tissues.  All the scientific planning and execution in the drug’s development and testing are irrelevant, because we have not provided it with directions to bypass millions of potential targets everywhere in its path when it tries to reach what we assume to be the target(s). Besides, what if our assumption is wrong?  This specific chemical we’ve made has a unique structure different from all the others.  But none has an extra specific ‘homing device’ to lead it directly to the assumed targets without bumping into millions and millions of other chemicals and cells, present in its path.  Just imagine the chaos it produces in our complex and extremely well-organized and functioning body. The end result can be different toxic side effects leading to new diseases requiring more drugs to treat, thus a persistent vicious cycle.  This scenario does not even include the potential highly toxic impurities from the synthetic process which can be almost sure to accompany the synthetic drug in question.

Does anyone have a solution to this scenario that’s due to our extremely complex and well-organized and functioning body?  Ideas, suggestions, and plans to start to deal with this toxic drug vicious cycle are discussed in my new book.  Please read it and spread the word if you think my premise makes sense.  I am thinking of our children and grandchildren’s generations, as it would at least take that long to extract ourselves out of this vicious cycle of current drugs, entrenched in our healthcare system for so many decades.

 

An Insider’s Scientific Look at Drugs and Herbal Supplements

 Re-publication of

 Leung’s (Chinese) Herb News 

ANNOUNCEMENT

Between 1996 and 2004 I published Leung’s (Chinese) Herb News or LCHN for short.  My main reasons for publishing it were stated in its first issue, including providing accurate information on traditional Chinese medicines and their practice, as well as simple specific remedies from Chinese journals, books, and other publications, reported here in English for the first time.  The beginning 3 paragraphs from its first issue describing the main reasons of why I wanted to publish the LCHN are reproduced below.

LCHN Issue 1