The role and efficacy of medical herbal therapy preparations

The core value of medical herbal therapy preparations that have been verified by modern pharmacy and qualified as national medicines can be summarized in three points - multi-target intervention for mild and chronic diseases, reducing adverse reactions of chemical drug combinations, and filling the medication gap for special groups (elderly people, pregnant and postpartum people, and people with liver and kidney dysfunction). It is neither a "magic drug that can cure all diseases" nor a "useless IQ tax", but an effective supplementary option in the current clinical medication system.

A while ago, I was doing rotations in the pharmacy clinic of the dermatology department of a tertiary hospital. I met a little girl who had just entered high school. She developed eczema during the change of seasons. She applied glucocorticoid cream for two weeks. The itching stopped, but a large area of light brown pigmentation remained on the affected area of ​​the ankle. The little girl liked to wear skirts, and she cried in the clinic because she was afraid to show her legs. Later, the doctor prescribed a medical cream containing purslane and artemisia annua total flavonoids, without hormones, and asked her to apply it twice a day, along with oral granules containing sophora japonica and white fresh bark extract. She came back for a follow-up visit in less than three weeks. The pigmentation was so light that it was almost invisible, and the eczema did not recur. Don't tell me, this kind of medical herbal preparation for mild skin problems can often solve the "finishing problem" that cannot be treated with chemical drugs.

Speaking of this, there are actually two different R&D ideas in the industry, and they have been arguing for almost 20 years. One group of researchers insists on the compatibility of traditional herbal medicines. They believe that the advantage of herbs is the synergy of multiple components, and there is no need to purify them into a single compound. Take the compound Danshen dripping pills that have been used clinically for more than 20 years. The ratio of the extracts of Salvia miltiorrhiza, Panax notoginseng, and Borneol was determined after hundreds of trials. It can not only expand coronary arteries to improve blood supply to the myocardium, but also inhibit platelet aggregation and reduce the risk of thrombosis. Many elderly patients with coronary heart disease who take it for a long time will not feel dizzy or have a hot face like taking a single vasodilator drug, nor will they have gum bleeding problems caused by anticoagulants. This is the benefit of multi-target effects. The other group are scholars who work on modern botanical medicine. They believe that only by purifying a single active ingredient can the mechanism of action and adverse reactions be fully explained. The most typical one is artemisinin extracted by Tu Youyou’s team. A single compound isolated from Artemisia annua has an antimalarial efficacy rate of nearly 100%. It won the Nobel Prize and is now the first-line antimalarial drug in the world. No one can say it is “unscientific.” In fact, both ideas have their own applicable scenarios, and there is no absolute right or wrong.

Two months ago, a cousin of mine who has been suffering from chronic gastritis for ten years came to me and told me that after taking omeprazole for almost five years, he now suffers from acid reflux as soon as he stops taking the medicine. The bone density recently found to be low. The doctor said that it may be related to the long-term use of acid-suppressing drugs, and asked me if I had any alternatives. I recommended a medical Hericium erinaceus and Amomum villosum extract preparation to him. It is not a health product on the market that claims to "nourish the stomach". It is a prescription drug approved by the state. I asked him to slowly reduce the dosage of omeprazole along with it. Now more than two months have passed, and he has reduced the dosage of omeprazole to once every other day without acid reflux. He went for a gastroscopy last week and found that most of the previous gastric mucosal erosion has healed. In this scenario of long-term conditioning of chronic diseases, the advantages of medical herbal preparations are indeed obvious.

Of course, I have also met many patients who complained that herbal preparations were useless or even had problems with their consumption. The one who impressed me the most was a college student who bought a so-called "pure herbal acne cream" online in order to get rid of acne. After applying it for half a month, his face was swollen like a pig's head. Only when he was sent to the hospital did he find out that a large dose of hormones had been secretly added to it, and it was not a formal medical preparation at all. To be honest, a large part of the current public controversy over herbal preparations comes from non-compliant products that confuse the market. Even regular medical preparations are not completely risk-free - for example, some preparations containing Polygonum multiflorum do have a risk of liver damage when taken in large doses for a long time. Therefore, the country has now changed all such oral preparations into prescription drugs, which must be used under the guidance of a doctor. They are not at all "all natural and have no toxic side effects" as everyone thinks.

I have been working in clinical pharmacy for almost ten years, and my biggest feeling is that there is no need for people to have extreme views on herbal preparations. Don’t regard it as a miracle medicine that can cure all diseases. If acute appendicitis attacks, if you don’t go for surgery and drink herbal granules, it will definitely delay the condition; and don’t beat it to death and think it is an IQ tax. In many cases, it can indeed solve problems that cannot be solved by chemical drugs. Just like the obstetrics department came to us for consultation a while ago, a pregnant woman in the second trimester had a severe cold and cough. She did not dare to take chemical medicine for fear of affecting the fetus. Finally, she chose an herbal cough preparation that has been proven safe during pregnancy. After drinking it for three days, she stopped coughing and the fetus was normal. This is its value.

In fact, domestic standards for medical herbal preparations are getting stricter and stricter now. A new anti-osteoporosis drug extracted from epimedium that was just launched last year has passed the third phase of clinical trials. Its effectiveness is similar to that of imported chemical drugs, and the incidence of adverse reactions is 30% lower. There will definitely be more reliable products in the future. To put it bluntly, whether it is herbal or chemical medicine, if it can safely solve the patient's problem, it is a good medicine.