What does medical herbal therapy preparations do

Under the quality control of modern pharmaceutical standards, targeted disease intervention can be achieved, the burden of adverse reactions of conventional chemical drugs can be reduced, and multi-target auxiliary support can be provided for the full-cycle management of chronic diseases.

Don’t think this is an official cliche. I have been working in the pharmacy department of a public hospital of traditional Chinese medicine for almost ten years, and the real cases I have encountered are much more vivid than the classifications in textbooks. Not long ago, I met a 68-year-old patient. He had been taking enalapril to lower his blood pressure for almost half a year. He had a dry cough that made him unable to sleep all night long. He had to take three antihypertensive drugs, causing dizziness and lower limb edema. Finally, the doctor in the respiratory department prescribed a medical coltsfoot flower total flavonoid preparation for two weeks. After drinking it for less than a week, the dry cough symptoms basically disappeared, and the blood pressure did not fluctuate. I have seen too many similar examples. Patients undergoing radiotherapy and chemotherapy take medical curcumin preparations to relieve vomiting, and children with seasonal allergies use herbal nasal drops to relieve nasal congestion. Many of them are minor problems that conventional Western medicine cannot take care of, but medical herbal preparations can just make up for them.

Of course, the industry has been quite noisy about the boundaries of the effects of this type of preparation. Most clinical doctors with a Western medicine background prefer single-component purified herbal preparations, such as artemisinin and paclitaxel, which have clear active ingredients and clear metabolic pathways. Formula preparations, such as the compound Danshen Dropping Pills that we have been using for almost 30 years, the ingredients of Salvia miltiorrhiza, Panax notoginseng, and borneol work synergistically, and cannot be replaced by a single ingredient. In many cases, the improvement of long-term chest tightness and fatigue in patients with coronary heart disease is more comfortable than taking Western medicine that dilates blood vessels alone. To put it bluntly, it is just like daily meals. You can be full just by eating polished rice and white noodles, but if you pair it with some grains and vegetables, the nutrition will be more balanced and the gastrointestinal burden will be less. This type of compound herbal preparations is almost the "grain side dish" in chronic disease management. It cannot be used as a staple food, but if it is missing, it is indeed missing something.

Many scholars in the field of evidence-based medicine have also questioned that the active ingredients of many compound herbal preparations are not clear, and the mechanism of action is unclear. Whether they are considered "effective" depends entirely on the subjective feelings of the patients? This is actually not a harsh statement. I participated in the clinical observation of an herbal preparation for cough and asthma in children two years ago. It is true that about 30% of the parents of the children reported that it was "useless", but of the remaining 70%, many of them were children who had vomited for two days after taking azithromycin for three days. After drinking this preparation, their coughs were relieved and they could eat normally. Do you think this counts as an effect? In many cases, the role of medicine is not just to “cure the disease”, but also to make patients suffer less during the treatment process is also a very important part.

By the way, I must mention that many people think that herbal preparations have "no toxic or side effects". This is a huge misunderstanding. The medical herbal preparations we are talking about are all obtained through attenuation, multiple rounds of toxicology tests, and clinical verification and have obtained the national drug approval batch number. They are not the same thing as the wild herbs your neighbors talk about casually or the three-no herbal health tea sold in the live broadcast room of Internet celebrities. In the past, a patient boiled Guan Akebia at home, boiled water and drank it to treat internal heat. After drinking it, he was sent to the emergency room for acute kidney injury. This problem cannot be left to regular medical preparations.

After all, medical herbal preparations have never been a "magic drug that replaces Western medicine", nor are they the "IQ tax" as some people say. Its function is actually very real: within the framework of modern medicine, it gives doctors one more optional tool and patients one more comfortable choice. When encountering serious infections, acute myocardial infarction, and other critical illnesses, antibiotics should be given and surgery should be performed. Don't even think about relying on herbal preparations, as that is just a joke with your own life.