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Chinese medicine honed by thousands of years of clinical trials |
Dr. Larry Wang describes the healing properties of Mom's soup
Dr. Larry Wang |
When Dr. Larry Wang was growing up in Taiwan, he learned all about Chinese herbal medicine.
"As a kid, I liked to go out and play in the rain and the mud and get as dirty as I possibly could," Wang says. When he got home, cold and wet, his mother would spring into action, cooking up a special soup to prevent her boy from catching cold.
"She would prepare a 'soup' for me: hot boiling water, chopped gingerroot and two or three teaspoons of brown sugar."
Did it work?
"Absolutely," said Wang.
"Ginger, we know, has many ingredients which can stimulate your metabolism, and sugar of course is the key fuel to allow the muscles to shiver, to heat you up." With this preparation, said Wang, - "with the hotness of the soup, a physical heat load from water, the ginger stimulating the metabolism and the sugar providing the fuel—you create a lot of heat to counter the cold."
Those childhood experiences with Eastern Medicine and his education in Western Medicine made Professor Wang uniquely qualified to deliver a Super Saturday lecture in September entitled "Chinese Herbal Medicine: Fact or Fiction."
Wang says there are shared similarities in the development of medical therapies among ancient eastern and modern western cultures.
The earliest written record of Chinese remedies was penned about 25 AD, and that writing represented knowledge developed over approximately 3,000 years, said Wang.
"We are looking at a fairly respectable and long-standing heritage," he said.
Over time, treatments that didn’t work were abandoned and those that did work were fine-tuned. Both systems rely on clinical trial and error to determine efficacy. In the case of the Chinese herbal treatments, thousands of years of development represent an advantage.
"Time is a wonderful ally in any medical development or biological developments. Through time and clinical trial and error, the Chinese medicines had gone through a very systematic and functional and even rigorous selection process."
Professor Wang, who made international news during the mid-’90s with the development of the Coldbuster Bar—a power snack now marketed under the name Access Bar—said direct comparisons between herbal and modern pharmacological treatments can be made.
A person suffering from high blood pressure can be treated with a refined, synthesized prescription drug. Another person can be asked to drink a Chinese herbal tea prescribed to reduce blood pressure. The results in both cases may be the same: the patient’s blood pressure drops.
"In terms of functionality there is very little difference in measurement of the end point. If you give a Chinese treatment instead of Western treatment both will be considered working properly."
The difference is that in traditional herbal treatments, no one knew how or why a certain therapy worked. In Western medicine, scientists are very particular about understanding how and why medications do the things they do.
Still, through reading ancient texts, Professor Wang is convinced his forefathers had some pretty solid theories, if not evidence, about the ways our bodies work and how medications affect them.
"The conclusion, I think, is that there is not very much difference, really."
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