Traditional Chinese Medicine treatment study

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I disagree.  The level of the alleged "therapeutic agents" can vary from season to season, and even in adjacent plants from the same row in the same harvest.  This is why they are extracted -- to produce consistent levels of those agents in every dose.

Take two aspirin or drink 4 to 6 cups of black willow-bark tea?

You decide.

Yes that's an important advantage of tablets - standardised dose. Against that there's the "wholefoods" ideology that says it's healthier to consume the entire herb than a purified extract. Some truth in that for sure, but it doesn't always work that way.

I'm the only person I know who adds purified caffeine to decaffeinated tea. Potentially I get the best of both worlds - I know how much caffeine I'm taking, and I'm taking it in a form that's closer to nature than just popping the pill. Similarly, I add vitamin C powder to mashed organic potatoes. Some of these active ingredients need co-factors and other bits and pieces from the source plant to work properly, and I'm always wary of what a tablet (an abnormally-concentrated slug of something or other) might do to the walls of my gastro-intestinal tract before it's completely dispersed.

Do not get me wrong . . . I take ginseng root tea as a tonic, use ginger root liberally to combat asthma, and use crushed garlic as an anti-fungal against athlete's foot.  This does not mean that I have sworn off manufactured medicines; it only means that I recognize the benefits of natural treatments for specific health conditions.

I also inherited an ancestral journal on rural living, with many entries on the medicinal properties of plants.  Some of it makes sense, and some of it is pure superstition.  The key is knowing the difference.

Indeed! A medicine that isn’t for all, perhaps.

My partner is a TCM practitioner and I have experienced first hand the health benefits of TCM (herbal medicine and acupuncture) for both acute and chronic health conditions. Her university training was as long as and as comprehensive as a regular doctor. I would also consider her knowledge of plants/roots/flowers and their medicinal benefit to be of equal status to someone who studied pharmacology as part of a medicine or nursing degree (as in depth of knowledge about the medicine each party works with).

Yes, it's usually best to figure these things out on a case-by-case basis I think.

Here is a link to a downloadable PDF scan of  The Encyclopedia of Herbs and Herbalism 

The copyright date is 1979, so it may be out of print.

My PDF viewer is a tad slow to turn the pages, but I can see it's a nice book. Fascinating illustrations.

OK, that's a good point.
As you said, plants in whole form have natural variation in potency so the dosing may be less exact.

There are pros and cons to both approaches, though.
For instance, whole plants may contain additional benefits that are lost when we adopt a reductionist mindset of extracting a single therapeutic substance, for instance there may be other substances within the plant that reduce side-effects and so on.
A similar shift is happening with the understanding of nutrition, as now it is recommended to obtain vitamins from a varied diet rather than rely on supplements, which used to be considered equivalent but studies have since shown are often inferior or completely ineffective.

I'm not saying I think we should all switch over from western medicine to TCM, just that I think both approaches have value and can learn much from each other.

That sums everything up nicely.  Thanks!

Another workaround for the variable potency of whole herbs is to assay the active constituent(s) and adjust the dose accordingly. The downside is that you'd probably have to pay somebody to do it unless you've got free access to the right gear.

Why do you think side effects are less likely in conventional medicine?

Read the labels, it's nothing but side effects....

Some thoughts...
Herbal medicine is in every country, it's not TCM specific.
TCM includes a lot of aspects that were common in the middle ages in Europe, like balance of fluids. Thus the practice of drawing blood by cupping or with leeches.
TCM includes a lot of IDK projecting? Like eating a snake or a tigers penis will better your sex life.
There's some strange belief in TCM that an endangered species have more power.
Also, this is cold, that is warm, with regards to food, that is supposedly good or bad for you depending on things. Again the middle age thinking of balance.

As for herbal medicine, the active parts of herbs are extracted to make medicine. If you consume the herb you get an unknown amount of the active parts and other stuff that may or may not be good for you.
If you consume the medicine, you'll get an exact amount of the active substance and nothing else. Be that good or bad.

/Mats