No, not really. Western medicine began to make leaps and bounds precisely when it began to throw away “ancient wisdom” (ie hocus pocus garbage) and start applying the scientific method.
I could agree with that if there was some evidence of it. I haven’t seen such evidence. It seems that subjecting tradition to logic is pretty much the opposite of “laughable”.
The thing is, it is entirely possible to come to an accurate conclusion using false assumptions. You just get lucky every once in a while. Some Chinese medicine does in fact seem to work but the underlying principles are pretty damn shaky.
The only true reason we have for the large body of medical knowledge we’ve reccently gained is the use of the scientific method.
There are a plenty. Here’s a rather short list of drugs derived from plants. Most notable is Taxol, originally derived from the Pacific Yew, then proved to be active in more common yew species, and invaluable in the treatment of breast cancer.
There has been a longstanding practice of botanical collection expeditions to the bio-rich Amazon region funded by Harvard and pharmaceutical companies, with legendary ethnobotanistRichard Schultes, mentor to fellow Harvard ethnobotanist Wade Davis,as Tuckerfan relates.The plants that both Schultes and Davis collected, in collaboration with natives knowledgeable about their medicinal use, garnered a great deal of active substances for analysis by pharmaceutical companies.
In Tuckerfan’s other mentions, the German Commission E Monographs, link is to the intro of that tome, a bellwether of reputable information on medicinal use of herbs, and we all know how shoddy German scientific tradition is, right? It’s quite sad that the US hasn’t created as worthy a volume.
Also, Dr. Jim Duke’s site is very reputable. He is an impeccable source, and has been cataloguing the constituents of plants and putting them up on that website. Do a search there for one plant, and it will detail the constituents, usually quite a complex panoply of chemicals. That is the greatest problem in analysing the effect of medicinal herbs; they are complex, and our science is just now understanding their synthesis of mechanics, and medicinal use. We isolate one active chemical, but the effect on the body may in fact be mediated by other constituents. I have great faith that scientific method will unravel those complexities.
From what I know of Traditional Chinese Medicine , it relies on a different template of understanding the human body, easily read at first as by Western minds as being a bunch of hooey. In my exploration of it, though, it is a cohesive system. It took me awhile to get that the Element system referred to bodily systems in a very articulate manner of categorization and detail, albeit a very different one from Western science. I’m a novice, though, so will not pretend to thoroughly understand it. I have understood enough to say that I respect it.
At any rate, Here’s a recent scientific study of the traditional Chinese use of berberine as a remedy for type 2 diabetes. So, studies are being done.
I had this feeling someone would bring up taxol, which is why I specifically indicated that I wanted drugs from traditional medical practice, not just from plants.
Excalibre
I’m heading off to bed, and have a feeling I will need to e-mail a pharmocognocist friend to find out the ethnobotanical history of Taxol, but, in the meantime, here’s a fine link to read about traditional use of medicinal plants and their use in drug development. Author Norman Farnsworth is an impeccable source. It’s a good read.
Thanks for the link!
If I recall correctly, Taxol was discovered through searching for potentially bioactive compounds in plants. Certainly a lot of drugs come from such processes, but I’m not certain that even they are a significant percentage of drugs overall. At any rate, Taxol is naturally present only in tiny quantities - if memory served, one person’s course of treatment would require stripping the bark from six adult Pacific Yew trees. It was eventually produced through synthesis starting with a natural precursor present in the yew’s needles. Such a process simply would not have been possible for traditional medical practice.
Here’s to the foundation… the herbalist, the shaman, the alchemist. Who brought New tone and knowledge to trialed experiment, cure, chemical, invention. To them a flagon, High…
Dr. Duke also has a wicked sense of humor. In one of his books, he relates the story of arriving at the DEA (or other Federal agency that deals with illict drugs) to give a lecture and couldn’t help but notice that some of the poppies growing in front of the building were the kind used to produce opium. He didn’t bother to tell the Feds that, though. 
Thanks for bringing up Commission E. Dr. Duke talks about them a lot in his works, but I couldn’t remember the name. (He also rails against the FDA for not only not having something like Commission E, but because their rules prohibit him from giving out medical warnings about certain effects of herbal medicines.)
I think you’re right about this, yew was used in traditional medicine, but not to the extent of cancer cure. (I’m still looking into that, though) The story of taxol’s introduction into it’s current use in mainstream medicine is compelling, though, and took decades. I’ll link to the obituary of Monroe Wall,( a hometown hero), which succinctly puts the case.
Perhaps a better example of a plant that was incredibly important to the success of the European migration to the New World is Cinchona, which gave us quinine, invaluable in the treatment of malaria. A synopsis can be found here, from a syllabus for an ethnobotanical course. Scroll down a bit, though the preceding examples are good as well.
Synthesis of quinine is possible, but complicated, so the bark of Cinchona is still used as the main source of quinine.
I hope that the links I gave were read, as they give evidence that medicinal herbs are seriously studied by pharmaceutical companies for new chemical approaches to medicine. To say that medicinal plants are hogwash and superstition is simply not accurate. If anything, the complexity of plant chemistry is now more able to be studied due to superior scientific means of measuring the active components. As to the OP, I suspect that the better methods of measuring and analysing the thousand year-old empirical tradition of Chinese herbs will most probably yield some correlation in the use of those plants. I think that inquiry is very important to discover new medicines.
And Tuckerfan Dr. Duke is a real treasure, who has had a career in the science of medicinal plants, and also the generous personality to weather the weirdness of the current medical climate in speaking about it. In his 70’s, he still leads botanical expeditions to the Amazon. A maverick botanist; if you ever have a chance to hear one of his talks, do so, he’s great.
Thing is, traditional western medicine goes back thousands of years, just like traditional Chinese medicine. All the way back to the Romans, and the Greeks, and the system of humours. And the bizarre treatments involved in balancing those humours…too much of one humour might cause a disease state, so the treatment is removing that humour. And what’s the most easy humour to remove? Blood, of course! It’s a lot easier to get rid of excess blood than it is to get rid of bile, or choler, or phlegm. And so traditional western medicine notoriously killed many people who might have gotten better on their own.
The story of the success of western medicine is the story of doctors with a scientific attitude who threw out traditional theories and cures, and tried to find out what actually worked. And pretty much the only treatments remaining from traditional western medicine are for things like setting broken bones. Pretty much everything traditional western doctors believed was wrong. Pretty much every treatment they tried was ineffective. Even though those treatments had thousands of years of tradition behind them.
The theory of Chi is just as stupid as the theory of humours. The theory that disease results from unbalanced chakras is just as stupid as the idea that disease results from demonic possession. Oh, unbalanced chakras are just a metaphorical explanation for a disease state? No more than demonic possesion was a metaphorical explanation of the germ theory of disease. Yes, you can see the parallels. Except the proposed cures for demonic possession have nothing in common with effective cures for infection. Prayers, scourging, bloodletting, holy water, an old priest and a young priest vs vaccines, antibiotics, handwashing and surgical masks.
While you do have a valid point, Lemur866, it is important to remember that for a good portion of it’s history Western medicine was hampered in it’s development by proscriptions against dissecting human bodies. This greatly inhibited the progress physicians could make.
And it should be noted that despite believing in things such as the four humours, the Roman physician Galen did undertake medical research in a scientific manner.
The problem was that no one built upon his work until centuries later.
But traditional Chinese medicine has the same problem, traditional Chinese medicine was developed entirely without dissection of human or animal bodies. Which is why there are these concepts of meridians, or chakras, or whatnot that have absolutely no correlation with actual physical structures in the human body.
There are some possibilities and promising drugs to come out of “traditional Chinese medicine” - but also lots of unproven claims and hokum, just as seen with traditional/herbal medicine in the West. Proponents of the wonders of Chinese medicine tend to gloss over the lack of quality studies, the relatively dismal life expectancy for the Chinese prior to the advent of modern mainstream medicine, and some of the quaint remedies (such as the practice up until recent times of consuming body parts of one’s relatives as medicine). More on the problems associated with Chinese medicine.
Actually, a lot of work has been done on the more popular and/or promising herbal drugs, including studies by the complementary medicine wing of the National Institutes of Health. If you do a PubMed literature search on St. John’s Wort, for example, you’ll find lots of studies (recent major ones have cast considerable doubt on SJW’s effectiveness in treating depression).
The gripe about how it’s too expensive to test herbal drugs is a bit hard to understand, seeing as the supplement industry’s annual sales run into the billions of dollars. Under our current flawed system, it’s much more convenient to skate around the requirements for herbals by marketing them as supplements and making all sorts of claims that are just vague enough to satisfy the law. The system is slowly improving, but I’m afraid it’ll take several more scandals like the ephedra mess to force the supplement firms to adequately test their products for safety and effectiveness (never mind the risks with U.S. firms - do you really want to trust your health to whatever unregulated mixtures are imported from China?).
The main issue with researching medicinal herbs in the US is that , after spending the necessary costs to prove efficacy, the herb itself cannot be patented, and therefore, the product cannot recoup the costs involved in research. The ultimate Catch 22. Isolated substances can be patented, so research facilities have to go for that brass ring. This, unfortunately, leaves out the pure research on the efficacy of a medicinal plant in it’s own right, under our current parameters of exploration.
I don’t fault the pharmaceutical companies in this dilemma, it’s a stilted system: and I know of researchers who are doing pure research on the efficacy of herbal remedies; they are bound, as one put it: “to drug mines”. Their funding comes from companies who want isolated compounds to patent, and no interest in a more pure science of reporting on efficacy of medicinal herbs.
There is a great tradition of pharmacy schools researching medicinal herbs, but not an active FDA presence, as with the German Commission E monographs. I do not understand why that isn’t the case; we, in the US, certainly have the resources and ability to compile a similar document. I’ll leave it to the reader to determine why the disparity exists.