I’d love to see the western scientific community do more research into TCM, but they seem uninterested and incapable of grasping the fundamental concepts of how TCM works. To test isolated ingredients on a mass scale ignores the principal of holistic medicine which treats each person as an individual. They may share similar symptoms, but the underlying causes may be different. That’s why you need a trained physician to give proper diagnosis, prescribe medicine, and monitor the effects. Especially in a holistic system where the medicine may not have been tested in the same way as western medicine. To then use these medicine in the same way would constitute an abuse. That’s the mistake that Ms Wong made – thinking that if Jin Bu Huan worked for other people it must be safe enough for her too.

Medicine are medicine, and should be treated with respect.

yeah, we could cut down statins a real lot if people would really go all the way with nutrion and exercise first. I will be the first to admit my diet is less than optimal and most people’s are. That’s the reason for it. it would take effort and people like it the way it is. Were all busy and lazy.

        Matt said:

There are plenty of effective treatments that are outside of mainstream medicine. Medicine is a business and some drugs and supplements can not be patented and there is no monetary incentive for them to become part of mainstream medicine. Just try talking candidly to a good doctor about it. Most of them only learn about new treatments through pharmaceutical marketing campaigns.

Actually I agree with you about part of this. There are effective treatments outside of using drugs, but I don’t think they’re a secret or any kind of thing a drug company could suppress.

There’s a treatment for high cholesterol called “get off your ass and also start eating better” and it is so effective that if people used it to the full possibility we wouldn’t be using nearly as many statins, which are really high profit. You know how they say “When diet and exercise are not enough..” In reality very few people really really push their diet and exercise as much as they could before popping a pill.

Yeah, this isn’t a secret. people like it that way!

        Matt said:

Yes there is a lot of deception, but an educated patient can find help.

How ironic to get a statement like this, from a supporter of alternate medicine, in a comment in a thread about a Ph.D. candidate that poisoned herself with this sort of thinking.

        DV82XL said:

It’s not the source we are talking about, it’s the lack of proper quality control in manufacturing the product, and the lack of testing, and the lack of proper knowledge in application.

That and the fact that many of these products do not help the problems which they are being taken for, because almost all ‘herbalism’ is a crock. That some of these things have found their way into the general pharmacopoeia does not in any way validate the effectiveness of those that haven’t.

There are plenty of effective treatments that are outside of mainstream medicine. Medicine is a business and some drugs and supplements can not be patented and there is no monetary incentive for them to become part of mainstream medicine. Just try talking candidly to a good doctor about it. Most of them only learn about new treatments through pharmaceutical marketing campaigns.

Getting a treatment protocol through the FDA is an expensive proposition. Thus simple solutions to certain illnesses will never become part of our medical practice. That is why many turn to alternative medicine. Yes there is a lot of deception, but an educated patient can find help.

That and the fact that many of these products do not help the problems which they are being taken for, because almost all ‘herbalism’ is a crock. That some of these things have found their way into the general pharmacopoeia does not in any way validate the effectiveness of those that haven’t.

        DV82XL said:

Of course this doesn’t bother to take into account that more people (by several orders of magnitude I’ll warrant) use conventional pharmaceuticals over herbal ones.

I wouldn’t bet my life on this assertion. How many people take vitamins for example? Herbs and folk remedies have been used by millions for a long time. In many cases they represent human trials performed over thousands of years.

A good master herbalist program or a study of phyto-medicine or phytopharmacology deals heavily with dosing, drug interactions physiology, biochemistry etc. etc. There is a whole science behind it and there are respected published peer reviewed journals in this area.

It’s simply silly to say that a drug has to be prepped by Merck, rather than grown in your backyard to be effective. As I said earlier, pharmeceuticals heavily rely on plant biochemistry. For goodness sakes, penicillin is basically a mold. I suspect modern pharmacology wouldn’t even exist if not for the herbalist of prior times.

Then it ends with this, “Conclusion: physicians are approximately 9000 times more dangerous than guns.” That is enough to make anyone realize that this is a sensational anti-establishment and very biased article.

I would love to see breakdown numbers for the deaths from pharmaceuticals.

I think most you’d get on the shelves of a drug store would be mostly harmless because people notice when someone drops dead, but the fly by night sources of them not really regulated at all. Does anyone know where she got this?