Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is big business, and American farmers are interested in getting a taste. Advocates say that growing Chinese herbs such as mentha haplocalyx, a mint used for stomach disorders, and angelica dahurica, an anti-inflammatory, could be a $200 to $300 market for U.S. farmers, especially "organic" producers.
In some ways, this is a good thing for TCM consumers. Many parts of China's soil is in such bad condition that using any plant grown in it is a risk. Many sites are tainted with heavy metals; partial survey data released by the government in 2014 stated that 19.4 percent of China's arable land was poisoned. For TCM, which prides itself on its "purity" and "naturalness," this is a grave risk.
U.S. government oversight should also reassure TCM consumers. Although "alternative" medicines in the U.S. are nowhere nearly as tightly regulated as conventional medicine, thanks to stalwart lobbyists who have managed to create loopholes for herbal "supplements" that ensure the Food and Drug Administration has only limited powers over them, standards are higher than in China and the potential civil liability of producers will ensure greater safety.
Between 30 and 35 percent of mainland-produced TCM, when tested in other countries such as the UK, has been found to contain unmarked quantities of other medicines, such as ibuprofen and steroids, often in dangerously unsafe amounts. Australian scientists found traces of the DNA of multiple species in Chinese TCM, indicating production contamination. "The current herbs from China are not of the quality they once were and U.S. practitioners indicate they are willing to pay a premium price for herbs grown with organic principles, locally, with high efficacy," Rob Glenn, head of the Blue Ridge Chinese Medicine Centre, told the AP.
But a fundamental problem remains. Like other producers of herbs for TCM products in China, the American farmers are treating them as a potential crop like any other; looking to maximize production with modern growing techniques and transplanting them to foreign soil. This is fine for food crops, where we have a clear idea of what the final product we want is; the distinction between healthy (or tasty) wheat and cabbages is obvious in the end product. But it misses the point in TCM.
We don't know what the active ingredient is - the herb, or the part of the herb that has the actual effect - in most TCM recipes. In some cases, multiple chemical interactions may be working together to produce the effect. The Chinese traditional pharmacopeia is huge, and doubtless contains many examples of genuinely effective medication, as well as many more that operated primarily on the placebo effect.
Trying to distinguish these is an important scientific project, because once the active ingredient is isolated it can then be tested, and reproduced much more efficiently, measurably, and cheaply. Herbs are just collections of chemicals in a messily produced form; there's nothing magical about them in and of themselves.
The active ingredient in many traditional remedies has already been isolated, from the salic acid in willow bark now used in aspirin to the anti-malarial compounds derived from the work of Nobel Prize winner Tu Youyou. But it's not as easy as just testing the plants named. Herbs are complicated organisms, and in many cases, the interaction between the growing conditions, the way the herbs were prepared, and even the soil or neighboring plants might have produced the active effect, when there is one. This is the science that can be glimpsed, very dimly, behind objections by advocates of herbs that the whole plant has to be considered rather than one ingredient isolated. When a potential antibiotic was derived from research based on an medieval English remedy, researchers highlighted that even the metals of the containers used in preparation might have had an effect.
Growing herbs in bulk using modern U.S. farming methods may end up creating a quite different end product from the small herbaries on which Chinese pharmacologists traditionally depended. Even applying "organic" principles to their production, while well-meaning, means bringing an entirely different set of ideas and techniques from those actually used in pre-modern China to bear.
Herbs grown in the U.S. will make TCM safer. But they may not bring us any closer to discovering which parts of it actually work. Encouraging the replication of traditional growing and preparation methods, combined with the careful use of modern scientific and statistical tools, could be the real miracle-worker.
The author, James Palmer, is a Global Times editor.
