[PoisedWoman]

This sounds promising.

You can get a little vial of pills in your local Chinese grocery store for $1.25 that absolutely positively cures the common cold in less than 24 hours. Gan Mao Ling, (or something like that) if you're interested. Always works for me and for everyone else I know whe's tried it.

[Enemy Of The State]

Dont know if I have heard of that one.

I usually get a bottle of "zheng qi pian" and "wei C pao"
there is another bottle of little green pills but I dont recall what they are. oh well.

[aruanan]

This sounds promising.



Not really. Chinese traditional medicine relies on "cures" or treatments based on long experience with certain conditions. It has nothing to offer a novel disease. Furthermore, it's based on symptomology and has no interest in discovering disease mechanisms nor the mechanisms of drug action nor does it use double-blind testing and statistical analysis of experimental procedures to eliminate the placebo effect and coincidence from test results.

I have a colleague who is working with a medical institute in China on traditional medicine. She is trying to identify specific compounds with recognizable drug effects. She has found one compound with a particularly strong estrogen effect. She says the biggest problem in China is that everyone says, "Why test anything? We know it works. We just want to run animal tests on it to make sure it isn't harmful." And she's at one of the best-equipped facilities.

She said that a big complication is that these medications (the actual drugs prepared in a pharmacy versus the patent nostrums sold pre-packaged in Chinese drug stores) are made from ingredients for which there is little quality control. The freshness (or lack of it), varying potency that naturally occurs within any species of plant, storage conditions, bacterial load, the relative potency (because of these aforementioned factors) of any one against the other ingredients (there are always multiple ingredients--an emperor factor, the active ingredient, a messenger, which tells it where to go, a moderator, which is to counteract adverse reactions or moderate the emperor, and a couple of others) all contribute to a final product characterized by great uncertainty. In addition to the uncertainty of whether one preparation according to a recipe is consistent with another preparation from the same recipe due to individual variations in the pharmacists' manner of preparation, there is the uncertainty of whether the product has any efficacy at all beyond placebo effect. The Chinese have great faith in their traditional medicine, but it is not a faith based on knowledge (ie., science) and carefully distinguished from wishful thinking.