Manipur surely has many traditional knowledge on medicine. As Chinese did we also need to look into that. A Push to Back Traditional Chinese Medicine With More Data By Shirley S. Wang The Wall Street Journal Traditional Chinese medicine teaches that some people have hot constitutions, making them prone to fever and inflammation in parts of the body, while others tend to have cold body parts and get chills. Such Eastern-rooted ideas have been developed over thousands of years of experience with patients. But they aren’t backed up by much scientific data. Now researchers in some the most highly respected universities in China, and increasingly in Europe and the U.S., are wedding Western techniques for analyzing complex biological systems to the Chinese notion of seeing the body as a networked whole. The idea is to study how genes or proteins interact throughout the body as a disease develops, rather than to examine single genes or molecules. “Traditional Chinese medicine views disease as complete a pattern as possible,” says Jennifer Wan, a professor in the school of biological sciences at the University of Hong Kong who studies traditional Chinese medicine, or TCM. “Western medicine tends to view events or individuals as discrete particles.” But one gene or biological marker alone typically doesn’t yield comprehensive understanding of disease, she says. To reach these goals, the overall quality of research on traditional Chinese medicine must improve. With studies of Chinese herbal remedies, for instance, rarely are scientists expected to provide authentication of herbs they’re studying, which makes it difficult to know what’s really in the concoctions. This hurdle also makes it harder for other scientists to replicate the findings, says Qihe Xu, a professor in renal medicine at King’s College London. Dr. Xu served as the coordinator of a recent 200-scientist consortium to study good practices for studying traditional Chinese medicine, dubbed GP-TCM. TCM treatments of herbal concoctions could be authenticated and standardized with more scientific study, and could serve as leads for drug development, experts say. One example of this possible development is Yale University pharmacology professor Yung-Chi Cheng ’s work looking at four-herb combination known as PHY906 for reducing the side effects of chemotherapy. The treatment appears to contain more than 60 chemicals. Researchers are studying it for its ability to reduce nausea and diarrhea and to enhance colon-cancer treatment...................... read more in below link. online.wsj/articles/a-push-to-back-traditional-chinese-medicine-with-more-data-1415036616?mod=e2fb
Posted on: Tue, 04 Nov 2014 19:19:01 +0000
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