When I was younger and I was feeling ill, my mother would prepare a traditional Chinese soup consisting of several herbs. Sometimes she would make me eat it even if I wasn't sick. When I questioned her why I had to eat it, she would be vague and say, "Oh, it's for preventing stomach troubles." I was extremely unsatisfied by that answer.
As someone who has been westernized almost to the point of no return, I find it difficult to understand the rationale people have for using thousand-year-old methods that only have anecdotal evidence to support them. No charts. No statistics. Only the word of patients saying that a particular medicine alleviated their symptoms. One might as well buy a plane ticket to Timbuktu to have a witch doctor pronounce some magic words. The most glaring problem is the placebo effect--perhaps these methods don't work at all, only the belief that they work eliminates the symptoms.
Some researchers have tried to put science back to folk medicine by analyzing traditional methods for possible compounds. In the reductionist approach, one chemical is isolated and tested against possible targets for efficacy. If it works, then they will try to work out the mechanism for action. The problem with this approach, however, is the fact that it is reductionist. How are they to know that they isolated the correct compound? How do they know that the compound works alone and not in conjunction with other compounds?
This is where the integrated approach comes in to analyze the efficacy of a mixture of compounds. Some pharmaceutical companies have already started to do this by using a variety of tools to narrow down the possible active ingredients including gene expression arrays, biological and chemical fingerprinting, activity-reporter assays, and mass spectrometry. Already, there is evidence that herbal medicine has scientific basis. Chemicals in the same plant, for instance, may act to inhibit metabolizing the main ingredient to a toxic compound, enhance absorption into the body, and prevent transcription of genes involved in diseases like cancer. Simply applying one chemical as a drug, then, would be ineffective and possibly even lethal. Several compounds are needed for several targets.
But despite the growing amount of papers showing the much needed hard scientific data, I remain skeptical. The consistency of any herbal concoction is iffy at best. Analysis of herbal remedies made by different companies do not have identical components--even samples made by the same company have been shown to have wildly different compositions. So if someone says that Herbal Remedy A works like a charm, when I buy Herbal Remedy A at the store it might not be the same thing.
