In my last post, “Thank you, America!” I told you my being admitted to the University of Michigan with a teaching assistantship.  That was real luck!  But then, I almost blew it…

On my arrival in America the last week of August, 1962, I met up with a college friend, Leo Lee, in San Francisco.  We had each bought a ‘See-USA-in-3-months’ Greyhound bus ticket for $99 before we left Hong Kong.  We had planned on doing a little sight-seeing along the California Coast, before heading northeast towards our respective final destinations, Leo to the University of Missouri and I to the University of Michigan.  Here is what I have written in my books:  My memoir (The Life of a Pharmacognosist…) and my combined book (Memoir + my Newsletter) titled, “My Life & Rollercoaster Career…” 

The following is from my memoir.

Chapter 4.  Adulthood in America

IGNORANCE IS BLISS!

San Diego was the last and southernmost California city Leo and I visited. While there, we decided to make a side trip across the border to see a bullfight in Tijuana, Mexico. We must have seen ads or something during our trip and decided to see a bullfight. I don’t remember whether or not the Greyhound bus went to the border at that time and if not, I think we might have ridden a taxi to the Customs & Immigrations checkpoint and walked across the border to Mexico. Once on the Mexican side, taxis were everywhere. We got on one taking us to the bull fight. We each had all our money and valuable belongings in our small bag. I had 200 dollars cash that was supposed to be for my living expenses until my first paycheck from my teaching assistantship. Leo was from a better-off family and had more cash than I. Since we had no idea where we were going or knew anything about Tijuana, what if the taxi driver took us someplace and robbed us? For a while I panicked. I had watched too many American cowboy movies with banditos in them! But then, we got to the bullfight arena soon enough. We paid the driver and got into the arena and watched the bullfight. It was not as spectacular as I had thought. Still, the event that followed was so etched in my memory which made whatever happened after the bull fight and the little tourist stroll in downtown Tijuana become non-events.

How we got back to the border checkpoint is a blank. All I remember is we were immediately detained by U.S. Immigration/Customs. An officer took us into a room and explained we didn’t have the proper documents to enter the United States, because our visas were for a single entry only. We used that up when we landed at the airport or the pier when we first arrived in the States. After maybe 30 or 45 minutes, or maybe an hour, of questioning and reviewing our papers, including university contacts such as correspondences and my teaching assistant appointment, among other papers, the officer was satisfied that we were legitimate students. He released us after giving us a stern lecture about immigration rules. He didn’t even call our school contacts, as far as I know. I was 24 years old and Leo perhaps a year older, obviously both naïve and innocent. Young people at this age now can be high-level executives in government or industry. And we were just starting graduate school and traveling like greenhorns. I shudder at the thought of this episode fast forwarded to now. What could have happened?

When I was a teenager in Hong Kong, there was a widely known case of a homeless European living on the Hong Kong – Macau ferry. I don’t remember the details, but he somehow got himself onto one such ferry without immigration documents. Neither the Hong Kong nor the Macau immigration let him land. For a long time he was living on that ferry as a homeless person without a country. This was the same ferry line I used to take to visit Uncle Siu and Aunt Pauline in my high-school and college days. It usually took three hours. Now the Hong Kong – Macau hydrofoil takes only one hour. I have never found out how the story with the homeless European ended. Regardless, I am grateful for the compassion of that U.S. immigration officer to let us back in.

Having been brought up in an environment encompassing some of the world’s most profound religions and philosophies (Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Catholicism), I believe in fate and luck. I have been certainly lucky on more than one such occasion.

In present-day America, I wonder anyone dumb and naïve enough as Leo and me to have crossed into Mexico and got back in the States without a visa.  Was I lucky!!

 #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!