Dr. Albert Y. Leung

They all use the VC to describe drug addiction as due to  our weak will power.   The drugs are addictive and once we take them, we start being addicted to them.    There is a whole industry built on addiction.  I have no idea whether it has so far made a dent in relieving the addiction they describe. 

The VC I  describe is not restricted to addictive drugs.  It applies to all synthetic drugs used in therapy because, being made from toxic petroleum, they are brand-new to our planet, hence inherently toxic.   Natural herbs and traditional medicines have no manmade chemicals in them.  Whatever chemicals therein have been with us since we appeared on this planet eons ago.  And our traditional medicines have been developed by our ancestors through trial and error over generations based on keen observation,  experience, and accumulated wisdom. 

Hence, modern synthetic drug therapy (with its scientific deficiencies) and traditional medicines developed by our ancestors (without a dose of ‘forced science’) can be used together with complementary benefits.  

The United States of America may be still the richest country in the world, and we believe we are still the world’s most advanced in health sciences, yet our health in recent decades has not ranked even among the world’s healthiest 30 or 40 nations.  Don’t you think with our wealth and advanced sciences, we should at least rank 2^nd or 3^rd or even 5^th among the world’s healthiest nations?  But 40^th or further down?!

Maybe over the past several decades, we have become less educated and less civilized than most other modern and democratic countries like Scandinavian, European countries, and Canada.  Being ‘educated and civilized’(?), our legislators have voted themselves all the benefits, (incl. free healthcare), but excluding us citizens they are supposed to serve.  They also voted themselves lifelong service. When did they do all these?  Also, when did they allow the gazillionaires who own our drug therapy’s VC (a perpetual fountain of gold for them) and for their interdependent industries (like insurers, promotors & advertisers) to openly push their drugs  on us on our living-room TV and exploit our already  poor middle class, not to mention our dirt poor?  What happened to our country?  It is obviously not democratic anymore.

As patriotic Americans, we should each try our best to do our relevant part.  That’s why for years I have been advocating improving our health using practical ‘scientific’ modern synthetic drug therapy (with deficiencies), combining it with our tried-and-true traditional medicines, to make us well and whole again.  Either one won’t do it because synthetic drugs are always toxic while traditional medicines are not specific chemical-based to be deemed ‘scientific’ by our drug scientists in charge.  In fact, some of my drug-trained colleagues used to call them non-scientific or even voodoo.  None seemed to be around anymore because I don’t hear anyone denigrating traditional medicines or herbs in recent years.   Younger than me, the handful of them must have died (or no longer lucid) some years ago, succumbing to the prolonged debilitating effects of synthetic drugs and additives that they had been taking.

Synthetic drugs.

These chemicals used in therapy are never totally pure, like 100.000% or more.  In most pharmacopoeias, like the USP/NF, ChP, and BP, they all allow a small % of impurities (like 0.5% to 2.0%) to be present.  I don’t think all these  impurities are tested.  Thus, if 1% LSD (100-200x stronger than psilocybin) is  present in a dose of psilocybin, the psilocybin will have double its psychedelic effects.  Does anyone know if all the research done over the past few decades on psilocybin had only used pure psilocybin (98% or 99% pure )?   Likewise, if a non-psychedelic drug is used together with another much stronger-acting chemical (say, 200x stronger) present as an impurity, we would have some serious toxicity issues.  Isn’t this all routine now?   And we seldom know what we are using scientifically?

            The reason I have brought this up is because synthetic chemicals are brand-new to our planet.  They are made from toxic petroleum or other fossil fuels.   Hence, they are inherently toxic, because no humans have interacted with them for more than 150 years, mostly for a couple of decades tops, via our ‘scientific testing’ in vitro, in vivo, etc. until clinical trials in humans, followed by approval for patient use.  Only then, the non-scientific testing begins, which our ancestors used eons ago when developing our traditional medicines.  It is a trial-and-error process typical of traditional medicines.  ,

Traditional medicines or natural herbs.

These multichemical natural herbs carry no brand-new and inherently toxic synthetic chemicals.  Whatever chemicals therein have been with us since time immemorial.  No need to subject any of them, as we do with brand-new synthetic chemicals, to ‘scientific testing’ (in vitro, in vitro, in animals & humans through successful clinical trials) and then go through the same process of trial and error used by our ancient ancestors.  Unlike synthetic drugs, natural medicines are already tried and true after thousands of years of use, no pregnant women taking them would give birth to deformed babies as with Thalidomide in less than a decade during the 1950s and 1960s.

Do you know of any drug that has no toxic side effects?  I don’t.   They appear over time surely and regularly, some right away while many others after decades, as with synthetic additives in foods and drinks.  There are huge highly profitable businesses built around the VC of synthetic drug therapy (drug companies, insurers, auxiliary healthcare companies, advertising companies, crooked politicians, etc.)

The impurities present in natural chemicals have been there together with the herbs since ancient times when we started using them for our health.  Unless we used some toxic new chemicals  or solvents to extract  them or produce them by biotechnology involving the same, giving us similarly unknown brand-new chemicals, traditional natural chemicals don’t have toxic impurities.

In my next post, I’ll discuss more about the damages synthetic chemicals (drugs & additives) have been doing to our health and environment.

During my teenage years in high school at the English Section of St. Louis, I taught myself Spanish with the British “Teach Yourself…” series at around 13 or 14 years old.  That was after overhearing my family talking about sending me to Havana, Cuba, to learn my grandfather’s business and take it over.  But the pending Cuban revolution killed that idea.  Regardless, I taught myself to read and write Spanish in less than a year.  The only person with whom I could say a few words was Father Ma (Machuy from Mexico) whenever he visited our school.  He later became the principal of the Salesian School in Shau Kee Wan on the East side of Hong Kong island, an hour’s streetcar ride from St. Louis School.  Then, I flunked out of St. Louis (failing over 3 subjects) during my third year because of family financial problems.  Since I was good in the major subjects, I skipped a year and passed the entrance exams to a newly accredited school.  Which means its senior students can take the unified School Certificate Exams with supervisors from the Education Department present.  With that certificate one was officially a high school graduate and could get a government job or attend college.  I  barely passed the minimum of 5 required subjects, but with 4 credits (honors).  Father Ma hired me to teach seniors chemistry at Salesian right away.  Besides Spanish, I taught myself French and German as well, but only to read.  Because in those days, PhDs required 2 foreign languages.  That saved me from attending language classes for at least a semester each.  The following episode is the last one which wraps up this chapter, including the areas appropriate to this post.      

TO GRADUATE SCHOOL IN AMERICA!

For my graduate studies, I only applied to two universities, the University of Washington and the University of Michigan. Michigan offered me a teaching assistantship sight unseen, probably based on my English test (at that time administered by the University of Michigan). I got a 97% in the test that included writing an essay on some topic assigned on the spot, conversation (for maybe 3-5 minutes), and also some reading comprehension tests, but I am not sure.

I was plain lucky to be able to go to college and then graduate school. The University of Hong Kong was very expensive and there was no chance I would go there. Since my chances of going to Cuba to learn my grandfather’s business were also nil because the Cuban revolution was brewing, the only choice for my higher education was to go to Taiwan. That was at the insistence of my father, even though we really had no steady income from Cuba anymore. That was when Uncle Siu stepped in to help out. He supported my five college years in Taiwan by sending me 10 USD per month which was sufficient for all college fees (education, housing, and books, among others) with extra for weekend entertainments (e.g., coffee house, movies, concerts, eating out, & snacking). [see Chapter 3: Uncle Siu & Aunt Pauline …]…

…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.

In first or second grade, I was detained after school because I had written my name of 3 characters too large, covering the whole exercise book.  My family had to send my sister, Mai, to fetch me. 

The other time was when I was a couple of years older at the Chinese section of St. Louis School.  I was expelled because I did not pay attention in class and disturbed other children.  That was what the prefect priest told my mother when she begged him to take me back.  After that was not successful, my parents put me in Chung Cheng Middle School (named after Chiang Kai Shek’s other name).  That school was halfway up the hill, which allowed me and three of my classmates to play ‘battle’ with rocks during lunch hour.  We had fun until one of the kids got hit on the head.  I don’t remember what happened next and how we explained his bloody head to our teachers.  But we never did this again. 

Regardless, the above was just background of my preteen and early-teen years. 

The life-changing episodes are the following from Chapter 1. Growing up in Asia (pp. 27-44) of my newest book, My Life & Rollercoaster Career (my Memoir + Newsletter) published in 2018 by CreateSpace/Amazon.

The following are the life-changing episodes reprinted:

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE STARTED MY SERIOUS QUEST FOR KNOWLEDGE

During the year when I was attending the Chung Cheng Middle School with fun-filled lunch breaks while they lasted, my parents hired an English tutor for me. She was a chubby Chinese girl in another Terrace (To Li Terrace) perpendicular to ours who was maybe three years older than me and a student at a well-known English girl’s school run by Maryknoll nuns. She was a good teacher. Finally, I seemed to have found my calling, and I picked up English fast and was at ease with it. For some reason, I felt like a new door to the world had been opened to me. And I actually enjoyed reading English books on my own. It seemed I had struggled all my life (all thirteen years of it) with the Chinese language and finally it was great to find something that came easily for me and learning was fun…

MY HIGH SCHOOL AND COLLEGE YEARS

After my year at Chung Cheng Middle School, I passed the entrance exam to the English section of St. Louis School (about a mile from home) and now I was on my way to be a good, and eager student! Life was much simpler in the 1950’s, no computer databases to cross check ‘trouble-makers’ like me. The English section might have no idea that I was expelled only a year earlier from the Chinese section. Yet I recognized the same prefect who refused to take me back when my mother pleaded.

I loved my new English school at St. Louis where all the instructions were in English, except Chinese subjects. My favorite subjects were the sciences (biology, chemistry, physics, math, and geography) and of course, English too. Right from the beginning, I found myself in the A class, out of classes A, B, C and D, with A being the best academically, each up to 45 students. I excelled in all science subjects and math. Then, after one summer break during which I read 30-35 abridged versions of English classics by authors like Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jane Austen, H.G. Wells, and many more, I went back to school and found myself excelling in English as well. However, reading so many books, sometimes late into the night on dim light, ruined my eyesight…    Soon, I had to start wearing glasses.

Although that summer of intensive reading had ruined my eyesight, it made me one of the best in English ‘overnight’ in my grade from Form 1 to Form 2 (comparable to Grade 8 to Grade 9). During my last year (Form 3) at St. Louis, I was selected along with a classmate called Tong Yuen-Yao to represent our school at the Hong Kong Catholic Schools/Students’ Press Club, or something like that, as I can’t remember the exact name; nor can I remember what magazine or newspaper they published. Tong was consistently the Number 1 student at our class, while I was somewhere between 2 and 10 or a little further down there, because some boring subjects dragged my overall grades down. Last time I heard, probably twenty-five years ago, he was married to a Quebecoise and was a professor in Quebec somewhere…

At my age, especially with my ‘ADHD’ handicaps, I waste too much time trying to write on my computer dealing with the new apps in Microsoft 365, especially those involving AI.   After the past few years struggling with my new computer, at least I can now write with fewer problems.  But handling my phone (esp. trying to text, write & communicate with it) is still a problem.   Which is why I seldom answer my phone and interact on it with people I don’t know.

Throughout my long career, I had always kept to myself, seldom volunteering to reveal my weaknesses.  Then, around late 2010, while writing my last book, My Life & Rollercoaster Career (my memoir + my newsletter of 8 yrs), I felt differently for whatever reason, maybe more technically secured or mature?  This book was published in 2018 by CreateSpace, now available from Amazon.  I recommend the e-version.  Unlike the paper version with an incomplete Index, the e-version is only a few dollars, but you can google any subject or word and it will lead you to the page describing it.

Since then, I have been more open with myself, weaknesses and all, along with my good points.  From an ordinary boy with lots of handicaps, but also a lot of help from family and friends, plus schoolmates  throughout my educational process (primary school through graduate school), I somehow ended up in achieving remarkable things that will continue to benefit my fellow humans. 

The very first thing I want to stress to parents with inattentive children (esp. boys like me) is to read my story.  My family knew I had inattentive problems (never-diagnosed ADHD), but they kept an eye on me and let me do my own thing.  I have always been thankful that I was not born in an era or into a family that uses drugs (mainly toxic synthetic) to treat conditions in children.  Then, when I flunked out of elementary school because I didn’t pay attention in class and got kicked out, my parents sent me to another school.   During that year they hired me an English tutor and that changed my life.

Tomorrow, I’ll finish describing that period of my life in the next post.  So, stay tuned…

Cured fo-ti (zhiheshouwu) is a key ingredient in our PhytoChi, one of several supplement products I have formulated which is still on the market, now only manufactured by Phyto CZ, s.r.o. in the Czech Republic.  It is sold/distributed worldwide.   All the other PhytoChi, using the brand name “EarthPower” stolen from me, are fake.    

At the start, PhytoChi was manufactured by Phyto-Tech and marketed by Earth Power, both companies owned by my family. Then, our Earth Power brand was stolen from us and PhytoChi was marketed under the EarthPower brand by companies without our permission.  Yet, they didn’t even have our formula nor the sources of the ingredients!  Not long after, we gave PhytoCZ the exclusive rights to manufacture PhytoChi in the Czech Republic under my guidance and market it worldwide.  Hence, PhytoChi has been on the market for over 20 years now and is still going.  So, only the PhytoChi originating from PhytoCZ is the genuine product!  I have been watching the treatment of Cured fo-ti (zhiheshouwu) by the Chinese Pharmacopoeia (ChP) since the late 2000s.  If I notice anything unusual resulting from this change, I’ll let you know.

From now on, I will concentrate on drug therapy with synthetic drugs vs. therapy with natural traditional medicines because I believe these two kinds of therapies are the answer to our future that soon would be overwhelmed by synthetics and the vicious cycle they cause.  These chemicals have lots of deficient qualities that can only be complemented with the experience and accumulated wisdom of natural medicines.

They have been used for over a thousand years in China – raw fo-ti mainly as a cathartic and detoxicant and is considered toxic, while cured fo-ti has tonic properties and is widely used in preventing white-hair growth and for various other conditions, and is generally considered non-toxic. 

The raw fo-ti after harvest is washed off its dirt and simply dried.  While the cured fo-ti is boiled in black bean broth for hours in non-iron pots until the liquid is absorbed.  There are also numerous other ways to make cured fo-ti, some using wine.  They all take hours, if not days, to complete.  Which is why when I first noticed the ChP specified actual amounts of chemicals in its standards of identity and quality for fo-ti, I was very surprised.  That was the reason I mentioned that some Chinese scientists, after having newly learned the synthetic-chemical or ‘scientific’ way, were awed by this ‘science’ and went along with their Western colleagues’ wrong thinking without seriously pondering the issues of the major differences between synthetic drugs and natural medicines.

The new standards in ChP 2015 (1% in raw fo-ti & 0.7% in cured fo-ti) of 2,3,5,4’-tetrahydroxystilbene 2-O-beta-D-glucoside (THSG) are obvious to me as a source of future trouble.  After prolonged boiling, there would be practically no THSG left in the cured fo-ti.   Requiring manufacturers to have 0.7% of THSG in their cured fo-ti would be impossible after all this cooking!   They would have to ignore the new ChP standards to continue to produce the cured fo-ti the traditional way which would fail ChP requirements but have a safe product that they have been used for generations.

The therapy with TCM herbs and formulas has been based on experience and accumulated wisdom.  It is a completely different system from modern synthetic drug therapy with its vicious cycle that I have written about for years!  The two cannot be treated alike.

There is no lack of motivation gurus to tell you how to discipline yourself and learn their tricks and tips to get ahead in life and make lots of money.  Do they tell you to give back?  I haven’t heard of any. 

          And there are these religious or cult leaders telling you to live according to the teachings of Christ or some other historical religious figures but that they need your money to do their religious or charity work, usually giving pittance to a faraway land with naked children crawling around that you only see in films, but nothing for the poor children in our own rich United States of America who are hungry and can’t afford healthcare because someone else acting and living according to these gurus’ teachings hoard most of the money and resources for their own personal enjoyment.  I have been a lousy businessman because I don’t listen to them.  But I have no regrets.  To me, there is no true winners in business.  When you win, someone else loses.  It’s all about greed and money and not always gotten honestly.

          As the only intelligent species on earth, we have ruined much of its environment.  As to our own living selves, few are aware of the deleterious effects of the brand-new chemicals (synthesized from toxins) that we ingest daily to treat illnesses.  Over the past 70 or 80 years, these drugs have led us to the vicious cycle.  If not broken or bypassed, its toxic drugs will cause irreparable harm to our body.  And to rub salt into the wound, this vicious cycle only benefits the drug makers and their associates (insurance companies, marketers, crooked politicians, etc.) because it is self-generating and perpetual.   The more toxic the drugs the more diseases, hence more income for Big Pharma!

          We need to do something about it for the sake of our future generations.  Hence, last year, I published my last book “My Life & Rollercoaster Career.”  One of my main reasons for writing it is to publicize the vicious cycle and to try to interest those of you who see this human disaster coming at our children’s and grandchildren’s generations and want to do something practical about it.  We already have the technologies to bypass it by first shaping up some so-called “herbal supplements” currently on the market, followed by starting to replace them with genuine herbal products with their unique fingerprints.   Then, we’d start to replace some modern toxic synthetic drugs in the vicious cycle with isolated natural chemicals that, unlike synthetics, have already been with us since our species appeared on earth umpteen years earlier. 

          My idea is to have nonprofit organizations (e.g., crowd-funded by consumers) or minimal-profit companies manufacture them and supply them directly to consumers, without the participation of marketers and insurance companies.  I am a scientist and an entrepreneur at heart.  I have over 50 years of research and manufacturing experience in chemicals and herbal products.  If you want to check me out, please buy my last book, or at least its e-version.  Although I have many handicaps, scientific thinking is not one of them. 

If you are not trained by one of the above gurus and want to start a new industry for the benefit of the less fortunate, please message me.  We can take it from there.  But please first read my memoir to know who and what I am.           Thank you all!         

Since the synthetic chemical era started about 150 years ago, all the synthetic drugs, additives, and supplements have one thing in common.   Being made from toxic petroleum and other fossil fuels, they are all brand new to our planet and have never had long interactions with us.  Hence, they are inherently toxic.  The toxicities of drugs generally show up in days or weeks, while those of additives and supplements, because of their lower doses, may appear years after our having started using them.   Now, due to the accelerating synthetic activities, producing countless of these chemicals, their side effects and new diseases are increasingly obvious among fellow Americans.

However, there are no efforts by the mainstream medical profession to try to reduce the use of conventional drugs made from fossil fuels.  Hence, I don’t see any movements to reduce legitimate drug use in the USA, despite its inherently toxic properties.  Even some bright Chinese scientists who had influence with the ChP have unknowingly changed the properties of a well-known anti-aging herb, cured Fo-Ti, to the cathartic, raw Fo-Ti.  [My next post will include this tonic vs. cathartic now in the ChP and the confusion in the English literature].

Chinese ginseng has been used in China since ancient times.  American ginseng was only introduced into China in the 18^th century and within decades, it was described as different from Chinese ginseng.  The Chinese didn’t use the science of botany or chemistry to tell the difference.  They used the experience of trial-and-error that their ancestors had used and taught them.  Unlike modern synthetic drugs with brand-new unknown impurities, whatever present in TCM herbs have already been there since our ancestors tried them eons ago.  They have all been tested  as safe, which is why we can safely ingest these herbs and formulas.  Not so with brand-new synthetic drugs with their impurities, for which our recent forebears were smart enough to design scientific tests (in-vitro, in-vivo, etc.) before clinical trials and finally approval for patient use.  Only then, the trial-and-error process that our ancient ancestors used is started all over!  There is no other choice for us to gain experience and time. 

So, the 2 therapies are very different!  But we can still use both, keeping in mind our health continues to be ruined by synthetics, which can be alleviated by TCM formulas containing tonic herbs or bypassed with natural chemicals. In my next post, I will address the confusions in TCM herbs in the English documentation, specifically addressing the tonic/cathartic named cured Fo-Ti and raw Fo-Ti.   Which is which?

Regardless, I think I know what it is trying to say:  there are these 2 groups of products – one is just herbs, whatever they are is immaterial, because you just have to do your best to market and  sell them; the other eventually will be destined to be scientific and evidence-based drugs.  I think the people involved in either group know what they can do.  One thing this article has done for me is that it has given me the reason why there are no standards of identity and quality for commercial herbal supplements, about which I have often complained.  Now, there would be no need to worry about what you sell, because the goods are not important.  The main objective of their existence is just being ‘health’ goods, especially the DSHEA does not allow specific claims.  The other kind of supplements (herbal or chemical), according to those dealing in them, is one step closer to ‘scientific’ or ‘evidence-based’ drugs, eventually with Big Pharma behind it.  Even with this group, I don’t think the players have any clue what they are dealing with – herb or chemical?  Especially they are not scientifically trained and don’t recognize that there is no science in drug therapy once a chemical gets  into our complex multichemical body.   Or they are so intimidated by ‘science’ that  they simply go along.  I have numerous posts on LinkedIn and on my blog  discussing this chemical vs. herb issue, especially the last one uploaded a day ago.

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