Medical herbal therapy preparations

It is neither a magic medicine that can cure all diseases, nor is it a pseudo-concept that charges an IQ tax. It is a type of medicinal preparation produced in accordance with modern medical standards, with clear active ingredients, and has been clinically proven to be safe and effective. Its current clinical positioning is mainly for independent use in mild cases and auxiliary treatment for severe cases. It cannot unconditionally replace chemical drugs, but it has irreplaceable advantages in specific fields such as respiratory, skin, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular rehabilitation.

Last winter when the influenza A epidemic was at its peak, I was following up at a community health service center. Half of the children outside the pediatric clinic had runny noses and were coughing and frowning. Many parents were in a dilemma: giving their children dextromethorphan for fear of causing drowsiness in school, but not taking it and coughing would keep them awake all night. During that time, what Dr. Wang in the Department of Pediatrics prescribed the most was a herbal cough syrup approved by the Chinese government. The ingredients were standardized extracts of aster and tuber. Later, I checked the follow-up data during that period and found that among 127 children aged 3-7 years old, 73% of them saw their nighttime cough frequency reduced by more than half within 3 days after using it. The adverse reaction rate was less than 2%, which is a little lower than chemical drugs with the same indication.

Of course, doubts have never stopped. When I attended a pharmaceutical industry conference before, a professor who was engaged in chemical drug research and development directly slammed the table and said that the mechanism of action of many herbal preparations was unclear, and they just "cured the disease in a muddle." The lessons from the previous aristolochic acid incident are still there. If the full process of phase III clinical and toxicological experiments cannot be transparent like chemical drugs, they should not be included in the clinical catalog. This is really not a nitpick. In the past few years, there were indeed many herbal preparations produced by small factories that did not have good quality control. The effective ingredients were high and low, and some even added chemical ingredients in violation of regulations, which ruined a lot of reputation.

Oh, by the way, there is another piece of trivia that many people don’t know. The country that has the most stringent standards for medical herbal preparations is Europe. The production specifications for herbal preparations issued by Germany's HMPC (European Herbal Medicines Committee) require traceability from the planting stage, which land was planted, what day it was harvested, what the extraction rate is, and the error in the content of active ingredients per unit of preparation should not exceed 5%, which is higher than the standards of many generic drugs. For example, the Ginkgo leaf extract preparation commonly used in cardiovascular and cerebrovascular rehabilitation was first made in Germany. Now more than 100 countries around the world have included it in medical insurance. Do you think it is a folk remedy? The pile of clinical data is thicker than a dictionary, and its effect on improving cognitive impairment and reducing the risk of recurrence of stroke has been proven experimentally. My grandma recovered from a cerebral infarction last year, so the doctor prescribed this. After taking it for half a year, the numbness in her hands and feet has improved a lot, and her liver and kidney function have not been abnormal in regular checks.

Many people tend to confuse medical herbal preparations with traditional Chinese medicine soups made at home and "pure natural herbal secret recipes" sold on social media. This is really a huge misunderstanding. Take Kangfuxin Liquid, which many people have used, as an example. It is particularly effective in treating oral ulcers and gastric ulcers. It is a standardized extract of Periplaneta americana. The content of active ingredients in every 10ml is fixed. The production process requires more than a dozen sterilization and testing procedures. It is completely different from grabbing the herbs yourself and boiling them at home. There are also many merchants who call herbal anti-itch ointments under the Xiao brand and herbal facial creams under the Zhuang brand as "medical preparations", which is even more popular IQ tax - real medical herbal preparations must have a batch number with the Chinese medicine approval on the packaging, and other batch numbers will not count.

The most controversial issue in the industry right now is the issue of evaluation standards. One group believes that all preparations must be based on the standards of chemical drugs. A single active ingredient must be found and the target of action must be clear, otherwise it is unscientific.； The other group believes that herbal preparations inherently have multi-target effects. In many cases, several ingredients work synergistically, and rigidly applying chemical drug standards will block many effective prescriptions. For example, Lianhua Qingwen is currently used to treat influenza. What do you think its single core ingredient is? I can’t seem to find it, but clinical data proves that it can shorten the course of influenza. You can’t use it just because it doesn’t meet the evaluation standards for chemical drugs, right? The two sides have been arguing for almost ten years, and there is still no unified conclusion. However, the regulatory thinking is also changing, and special approval channels have begun to be established for herbal preparations, which require both clinical effectiveness and no strict requirements on a single active ingredient.

I always keep two medical herbal preparations in my medicine cabinet at home, one is the cough syrup I just mentioned, and the other is an herbal spray for treating burns and scalds. The last time I was sprayed with oil when cooking, there was no foaming the next day. The effect is much better than the Western medicine scald ointment I bought before. But I have never believed in the herbal secret recipes in the circle of friends that say they can cure diabetes and high blood pressure. To put it bluntly, this thing is like all medicines. There is no good or bad, only whether it is suitable for the symptoms and compliant with the regulations. If you use it as an auxiliary treatment option and follow the doctor's advice, most of the time you can get good results. ； If you use it as a magic medicine that can cure all diseases, you will only be the one who suffers in the end.