Feb 15, 2007
Does Traditional Chinese Medicine work
Many of the health claims of herbal medicine bear fruit for the pharmaceutical industry, leading to new drugs that are more potent and more targeted than the original remedy. In Traditional Chinese medicine there are many health claims for the likes of Ginkgo biloba and many other remedies that might bear closer scrutiny. Now, pharmaceutical chemist David Barlow and colleagues Peter Hylands and Thomas Ehrman at King’s College London have undertaken the biggest study yet of the active ingredients in TCM and used an analytical system known as a multiple decision tree technique, called Random Forest, to unearth the root of the activity of the natural products in TCM.
Their study seems to vindicate many of the claims of TCM as well revealing several compounds that might be indicated for diseases and symptoms not treated with in the traditional system.
The team built a database containing well over 8000 compounds from 240 of the most commonly used TCM herbs and used a second database of almost 2600 known active plant chemicals and other natural products as a training set for the Random Forest computer algorithm. The team found that about 62% of the herbs they tested in silico against various drug targets (mostly enzymes associated with pathogens or problems in the body) contained candidate drug compounds that might be isolated for treating a single disease without the associated issues of a TCM approach. They also found that more than half of these compounds worked against at least two diseases and so might have multiple applications.
You can read more about this research today on SpectroscopyNOW news round up from David Bradley. I asked Barlow about the wider application of this research and he said it might be applied equally well to other databases. “The same methodology might also be applied in screening other similar databases, constructed, for example, with reference to herbs used in Ayurvedic medicine,” he said.
Traditional Chinese Medicine was in use from ancient days itself. It’s the ancient holistic medical system and was in practice for thousands of years. It’s also interesting to know that TCM doctors were paid if & only their patients remained well enough. Therefore we can definitely trust upon Chinese Medicines for certain treatments.
I’m a firm believer in evidence-based medicine. There is no evidence for the notion of detox. If anything adding herbal remedies, TCM, Ayurveda or otherwise) to your diet will increase toxins in your live, bloodstream etc because these will simply add to the weight of biochemical processing that your liver and kidneys need to do. Moreover, there is evidence that certain so-called “natural remedies” contain toxic heavy metals and other poisons.
my husband is planing to start to use chinese medicine, he just went to a chinese center where he saw a ‘doctor’ and told him that his back pain, and he is tired, becouse he hasa liver or kidney problem, aparently the muscles are fine, and the doctor said that he could start a detox progam for 4 months and try herbal, and natural medicine, my husband take very seriusly but i want to research firts what do the peple say, i mean, does it have a cosecuenses or does it works.??
My latest science news column on SpectroscopyNOW.com discusses anti-arthritic compounds found in Chinese medicinal ants. Anyone tried this novel therapy for arthritis and want to share your experiences?
db
Nicely put Chris. I think that probably encapsulates how I feel about the conventional-complementary dichotomy. There most certainly is a placebo effect, we have no idea how it works, we have no idea why many pharmaceutical drugs work, we certainly have no idea why some alternative treatments work. Equally, we have no idea why some proponents in both camps are adamant that their approach is the perfect solution to the problem of illness and cannot handle well evidence to the contrary.
db