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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.

Many thanks for the interesting post.

I've had very good results with traditional Chinese medicine, both acupuncture and herbs. The Traditional Chinese doc I went to in San Francisco made up herbal compounds on the spot, sometimes piling up a 4-foot long counter with ingredients that he'd brew up into a tea while I waited. Twigs, bark, stems, antlers, and who knew what else piled a foot high.. Of course, the quality of any ingredient might vary, and it certainly looked unscientific, but I assure you, his was the best medical treatment I've ever received. My ailments were not too serious, I must admit. For serious stuff, and also for lab tests, I'd head straight to the Western doctor and hospital.

While science must question these things, as a patient, I don't really care whether symptom relief is all I get if symptoms are relieved and never come back. I don't want to be a human guinea pig, but have no objection to availing myself of ancient formulas that have been proved not to hurt me and have a good track record.

OTOH, Western meds almost always give me side effects and I truly fear they could kill me...my American doc calls me a "high responder," and prescribes 1/2 to 1/4 normal dosage for me. Last year, for example, four months on 1/4 dose of Lipitor lowered my cholesterol 110 points. A regular dose might have really damaged me my doc is the first to admit.

One of the first popular writers on nutrition, Adele Davis, used to stress the point that we should make our bodies "a fortress against disease," which I consider very good advice. I'll bet the ranch that most who die from SARS are rundown or even subtly malnourished and cannot throw off the disease.

A sidelight I hope won't bore you..my ophthalmologist is Chinese, grad of Johns Hopkins....his daughter is at Harvard Med and is taking a year in China to learn traditional Chinese medicine. He was not too thrilled with her doing so, because, he said, she was too Western and would never catch on.