Medicine looks back to its roots

By Andrew Jack
Published: May 7 2008 18:33 | Last updated: May 7 2008 18:33

In a laboratory near Shanghai’s futuristic magnetic levitation train track, dozens of scientists are studying how to convert medicines described in Chinese texts written 2,000 years ago into modern western treatments.
The Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica (Simm), founded in the 1930s and reinforced through co-operation with international pharmaceutical companies over the past decade, is one of many organisations that hope for fresh medical breakthroughs inspired by ancient lore.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6a5d14ee-1...077b07658.html

paula

dear Paula,

to bigpharma catching on is another way for them to be richer...
so it would be a win win -

i was waiting for someone to say that...lol . Even tho it's not funny.[it might take longer if the patents start flying]

paula

Well, I find this pretty interesting, and thanks, Paula. What I find most remarkable is there seems to be complete lack of recognition among the 'Western' or modern 'scientists,' that these ancient systems of knowledge existed or exist within a network of information and wisdom about the relationship of everything to each other. Of course there was much subtlety in the ancient compounds because then there was still a connection to the lifeblood of the earth itself. And people didn't get the cancers they get now because they weren't battling the accumulation of pesticides, the disruption of the food chain by agribiz and were still eating things like real cows that ate grass with bugs that all played a place in building our tissues, our immune systems, instead of soy by-products stripped of all vitality, and antibiotics that then accumulate in our tissues in weird ways....We're the ones that know hardly anything, and we think we can go in there and selectively weed out certain items that 'work' without even having the glimmer of a recogition of the complex balance with nature that many of these systems were masters of.

Now we sit in our isolated shrines of supposedly inert plastics, with our shiny, throwaway stuff, with no close relationships to animals, to the incredible growing things around us, the water and soil.....The hubris of these scientists to me is beyond belief, and this is not even addressing the greed component.

In my recent reading about mucuna, one of the things that delighted me the most, besides discovering that is not so toxic and possibly makes your brain a little better rather than guaranteed degeneration, was the fact that in Central America mucuna is used as a 'fertilizer' crop. They say it gives the land courage. After planting maize for a couple of seasons in a field, instead of then letting it lie fallow for five years, they plant mucuna for two, and somehow it revitalizes the earth so that they can plant maize again. I thought how wonderful that this plant does the same thing in our bodies somehow, gives us courage. And meanwhile our guys are scrambling to find out the special thing that makes mucuna work - gee, it's not really dopamine or serotonin or this or that, but something in there is acting in some unusual way....

Reminds me of a friend of mine who was a doctor and nutritionist in the Peace Corps in the late 70's. He was sent on a mission to Central America to teach the people from a certain area how to have better nutrition. Upon arrival he found that they had an amazing and brilliant way of farming and combining proteins through the crops they grew. The result of his mission was that he studied their ways and brought them back to the US. These people needed nothing that he was to give them.

The old Chinese Qi Gong masters often lived into their 100's. I know of an indigenous people in South America among whom I have friends, who have no contact with technological society. They are brilliant scientists, philosophers, and thinkers, with no written language, and no history of warriors or weapons. They know all about us and choose not to be a part of our world at all. Despite having none of our modern accoutrements, they routinely live into their 100's, and are still climbing around their beautiful mountains at that age. Their philosophy is that the purpose of human life is to protect all other life on this planet. What divinity.

So much for our notion that life among the savages was routinely nasty, brutish, and short. I think we have a lot to reconsider.

That was a very spiritual post Fiona, i could easily go there mentally. But do we believe or even want to go there in our lifetimes? If not, what do we want to actually see happen? The differences in how we think are probably brain hemispheres - well ok albeit they are pint sized at this point - apart, but that doesn't mean they can't reach the same conclusion or goal.

What do you [ you is rhetoric] expect to see happen? If no safety or efficacy info exists to prove these medicines work and have no interactions, how do you know they do? Do you just want to remain independent and do your own thing? Who are the greedy patients going to sue if their liver explodes?
There was so much more but i timed out while typing it - devil gone for now.
respectfully,
paula

the standards are there at the FDA sometimes we think -they are being enforced yet they are only slightly -because we the people who actually have standards and to some degree of imperfection -do wish to have
a keeper / an authority tell us if these medicines are good/ or bad, thus far
the "THEY" have done a pretty bad job -in this land of opportunist - our free country in theory - for the most part, it has been an oligarchy -

so if someones heart explodes, or they kill themselves because the "safe drug"
causes them to lose hope and I know this has happened -
as example mirapex?

such a freakin horrid drug? so some female PD patient goes out and gambles all and no one knows -that the dear Lady - has no money, so she sits in her car on the railroad tracks at night, waiting for the train to to do her in -
and so it happens, the FDA knew this could happen -you can bet on it!
and the state builds the casino's w/ the bells = reward system -
pavlov's fact and she in her car in fact gets killed by the train...

who does she sue first? in fact no one - if she had family, there will not be
much to bury -and the lawyers have a system, try to get a lawyers lisence
pulled only happens when their firms do not wish to take a fall,
so we have a corrupt/ system...

the only thing we can do - and that would be like fiona said -go back
to the old healers or stay status qou -
and yet we still have a choice - as long as we in the USA do not start enforcing childhood vaccinations for parents and belief systems to be over ruled ...or draft soldiers to fight wars that are conscientious objector...

we can not be free that way... we can not submit to a corrupt system
because we are living in an Orwellian society -now and many are asleep/
lulled to sleep by being on drugs -when drugs were not needed,
- and propaganda rules the minds of the over medicated or the over zealot war patriots
- this is the New Order that the Hitlers/and Stalins and our president and his father have been pushing for... it is the Roman era again -one world government -
history repeats -doing the same thing over and over expecting a different
result -
Einstein deemed this as the definition of insanity...

I therefore do not like forced anything -

so that leaves us once again with the ultimate
and ongoing battle between -good and evil -
so we must choose who we are going to serve?
this is my best guess - hypothesis of what I have seen ...

quoting Napoleon who said, “What is history, but a fable agreed upon.”

"Chronological snobbery," [is] the uncritical accpetance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood. From seeing this, one passes to the realization that our own age is also "a period," and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions. They are likeliest to lurk in those widespread assumtions which are so ingrained in the age that no one dares to attack or feels it necessary to defend them.

C. S. Lewis, in Surprised by Joy