Traditional Chinese Herbal Medicine – East Meets West in Validation and Therapeutic Application

Abstract

Chinese herbal medicine has been practiced for thousands of years, and is used increasingly in western countries in conjunction with or in place of allopathic medicine. The earliest extant book of material medica, known as Shen Nong Bencaojing (The divine farmer’s material medica), appeared in the third century AD. At that time, the Father of Chinese herbal medicine Shen Nong, had classified 365 entities of herbs and drugs (Yang, 2005). The herbal tradition reached its peak some thousand years later, in 1552-1578 AD, of when Li Shi-zhen compiled his Great Herbal Bencao Gangmu (Compendium of Materia Medica) of 52 volumes which described 1,892 herbal entities in details (Li, 2003). The World health Organization (WHO) estimates that at least 75% of the world’s population utilizes traditional medicines for healing and curing diseases (Robinson & Zhang, 2011). However, the holistic concepts of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) are far removed from the reductionist principles of the modern day Western approach, and are difficult to express and comprehend in western terms. Western medicine is evidence-based and diseasefocused, and relies on the double blinded, randomized, controlled clinical trial as the gold standard to assess clinical utility and safety of treatment, which is usually a pure chemical with a defined pharmacological action. Conversely, TCM is based on history, experience, culture and belief, and most herbal medicines are complex mixtures of largely unknown chemical composition. In western terms, the health benefits of most herbal remedies remain unsubstantiated by scientific evidence in well-designed human studies, and this limits their acceptance by western trained health professionals. In addition to efficacy, the issues of toxicity and of herb-herb and herb-drug interaction that might be additive, synergistic or antagonistic need comprehensive scientific study. In this chapter, we overview the divergence and convergence between the two systems, and explore into nowadays methods used in herbal case-studies representing different stages of herbal use and evaluation. More importantly, the need for and feasibility of performing controlled trials for scientific validation of herbal medicine are discussed, thus repositioning the herbal research, and helping to decide the most favorable direction for East meets West.