Chinese medicine can be either in an individualized form or "generalized" "ready to use" form. The individualized form (often in liquid) is more personally tailored per your symptoms, tongue and pulse by a practitioner, then does "plus and minus" based on original recipe(s) in which hundreds of TCMs are inherited to today. The "generalized" (ready to use) form is the one with minimum "plus and minus" and generalized to fit the commonalities, usually in bolus, tablet, granules, IV and so on.

It is true that the individualized form by a practitioner could be more effective, however, it can be only so when the medicine fits your problem(s) and there is a good practitioner available to you. So it is limited, obviously. For these reasons and others, the "generalized" form with minimum "plus and minus" has been becoming very common. Further in this direction, the extract of a single herb is also showing great promise, as it is just like a pharmacological compound, more scientifically based so to speak, and is very popular now. Ginkgo Biloba, Curcumin and a lot more are examples...

thank you for the informative response. Appreciate it. FYI I was referred to a practitioner 40 yrs in the business by friends in the Korean community who have one foot in TCM and one in Western med. Highly regarded and I am confident to the degree that my skeptical but open western mind allows.

Another paper on Gou Teng, hope is not a repeat.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22113202

Isorhynchophylline, a natural alkaloid, promotes the degradation of alpha-synuclein in neuronal cells via inducing autophagy
Lu JH, Tan JQ, Durairajan SS, Liu LF, Zhang ZH, Ma L, Shen HM, Chan HY, Li M.
Source
School of Chinese Medicine, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong.

Erratum in
Autophagy. 2012 May 1;8(5):864-6.

Abstract
Accumulation of α-synuclein (α-syn) in the brain is a pathogenic feature and also a causative factor of Parkinson disease. Isorhynchophylline (IsoRhy) is a major tetracyclic oxindole alkaloid isolated from the Chinese herbal medicine Uncaria rhynchophylla (Miq.)Jacks (Gouteng in Chinese), which has been used for the treatment of neurological diseases in East Asia for centuries. Here we report a novel function of IsoRhy as a neuronal autophagy inducer. IsoRhy induced autophagy in different neuronal cell lines, including N2a, SH-SY5Y and PC12 cells, and also in primary cortical neurons. Furthermore, IsoRhy induced autophagy in the fat bodies of Drosophila. IsoRhy promoted clearance of wild-type, A53T and A30P α-syn monomers, α-syn oligomers and α-syn/synphilin-1 aggresomes in neuronal cells via the autophagy-lysosome pathway. More importantly, IsoRhy was able to decrease the expression levels of wild-type and A53T α-syn protein in differentiated human dopaminergic neurons. Notably, IsoRhy-induced autophagy was independent of the mTOR pathway but dependent on the function of Beclin 1. Taken together, data from this study raise the possibility that oxindole alkaloid derivatives may serve as a means to stimulate autophagy in neuronal cells, thereby exerting preventive and therapeutic values against neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson disease by reducing pathogenic protein aggregates in neurons.

CUHK is a different school in Hong Kong than HK Baptist Univer. and they have a study on uncaria rhynchophylla (Gou Teng) on AD published online 2012 June 20.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3388340/

Published online 2012 June 20.

Bioassay-Guided Isolation of Neuroprotective Compounds from Uncaria rhynchophylla against Beta-Amyloid-Induced Neurotoxicity.
Xian YF, Lin ZX, Mao QQ, Hu Z, Zhao M, Che CT, Ip SP.

Source
School of Chinese Medicine, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong.

Abstract
Uncaria rhynchophylla is a component herb of many Chinese herbal formulae for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases. Previous study in our laboratory has demonstrated that an ethanol extract of Uncaria rhynchophylla ameliorated cognitive deficits in a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease induced by D-galactose. However, the active ingredients of Uncaria rhynchophylla responsible for the anti-Alzheimer's disease activity have not been identified. This study aims to identify the active ingredients of Uncaria rhynchophylla by a bioassay-guided fractionation approach and explore the acting mechanism of these active ingredients by using a well-established cellular model of Alzheimer's disease, beta-amyloid- (Aβ-) induced neurotoxicity in PC12 cells. The results showed that six alkaloids, namely, corynoxine, corynoxine B, corynoxeine, isorhynchophylline, isocorynoxeine, and rhynchophylline were isolated from the extract of Uncaria rhynchophylla. Among them, rhynchophylline and isorhynchophylline significantly decreased Aβ-induced cell death, intracellular calcium overloading, and tau protein hyperphosphorylation in PC12 cells. These results suggest that rhynchophylline and isorhynchophylline are the major active ingredients responsible for the protective action of Uncaria rhynchophylla against Aβ-induced neuronal toxicity, and their neuroprotective effect may be mediated, at least in part, by inhibiting intracellular calcium overloading and tau protein hyperphosphorylation.