Abundant Heaven

Herbal medicine is a powerful and essential aspect of Chinese medicine.  Chinese herbal medicine is used effectively to treat a wide variety of ailments or to support conventional treatment and improve outcomes.  There are hundreds of standard formulas used to treat common medical complaints and conditions, some of which have been used by billions of people over hundreds of years.  For a perspective of current day practices, consider that in a large Chinese Medicine hospital they will use over 3 tons of herbs to treat thousands of patients per week [25].  They approach health and disease from an integrative and collaborative approach to medicine, utilizing the best of Western medical knowledge and technology and the best of Chinese medicine, acupuncture, and herbal medicine.

 

Clinical research into botanical medicines is expanding every day.  There is evidence for the use of herbal formulas for the treatment a wide variety of symptoms and disease patterns, including respiratory infections such as common cold/influenza [1, 2, 3], menstrual pain [4, 5, 6],  Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) [7], childhood asthma [8, 9], all manner of heart disease [9, 10, 11], cancer-treatment support [12 , 13, 14, 15, 16, 17], osteoporosis [18, 19], infertility [20, 13], fibroids, [22], impotence [14], Diabetes mellitus Type 2 [23],  and Alzheimer's disease [24, 28],  spinal chord injury [26], allergies [30], and anti-aging [27].
 

And excerpt from the recently published "Medicinal Plants - Recent Advances in Research and Development" evaluates the extent and potential of Chinese herbal medicine in today's world, saying:

"The knowledge base of Chinese Herbal Medicine (CHM) is both vast and diverse. Chinese medicines are all derived from natural products, with roughly 90 % coming from plants. Approximately 5000 plant species with therapeutic value have been identified, many of them used as Min Chien Yao, or folk drugs. About 500 of them are commonly prescribed by doctors of Chinese medicine based on a series of systemic and self-contained theories (Chung Yao, Chinese Materia Medica). This systematic approach is necessary because most CHM-derived products involve multicomponent processed herbal formulations. Although CHM does not provide the same scale and scope of modern day clinical trials, they no doubt offer a vast knowledge base from which to gain valuable insights relevant to current chronic health issues. The combination of CHM and modern scientific practices has the potential to lead to both new clinical trial candidates and adjunct therapies for current Western medicine treatments (Lee et al. 2013).

 

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Chronic diseases such as diabetes, arthritis, heart disease, high blood pressure, etc. can be debilitating to patients and can drastically alter their quality of life. CHM has the potential to offer solutions to many of these modern chronic diseases. Some of the current areas of interest for scientists focusing on CHM-derived drug discovery are as follows: antioxidant and antiaging activity, blood pressure-lowering effects, hypolipidemic action, blood sugar-lowering effects, antiallergic functions, and antiarthritis properties." [29]