Volume 167, 5 June 2015, Pages 86–96
Potent Substances: On the Boundaries of Food and Medicine
What's past is prologue: Chinese medicine and the treatment of recurrent urinary tract infections
Abstract
Ethnopharmacological relevance
Chinese
herbal medicine (CHM) has a recorded history of over 2000 years that
may be used to authenticate and guide modern treatments for disease, and
also identify neglected but potentially useful treatment strategies.
However this process is often based on over-simplistic conceptions of
tradition and history that fail to take into account the dynamic nature
of ‘traditions’ and underestimate the importance of contextual factors
in their interpretation.
Materials and methods
As
part of a process of defining good practice for a clinical trial of CHM
for recurrent urinary tract infections, a selective review of classical
Chinese medical texts was undertaken to investigate the historical
treatment of urinary diseases specified by the traditional category of
Lin diseases.
Results
The
historical review provided interesting insights into the evolution and
meaning of Lin diseases and how pertinent data may be found, precisely,
outside the boundaries of the categories on which the original
investigation was premised. Although there were interesting parallels
and continuities in the classical and modern understandings of the
aetiology, pathophysiology and treatment of urinary diseases, there were
also important divergences.
Conclusions
It
became apparent that, in the search for ‘traditional’ herbs to treat a
particular modern syndrome it is essential to contextualise remedies,
including as far as possible the intertextual, social, cultural, and
gender context, and conditions of practice. Historical ethnopharmacology
adds a level of subtlety and complexity to over-simplistic attempts at
bioprospecting. Some insights that emerged from this historical review
could inform the proposed clinical trial but these have had to be
filtered through the constraints of modern regulatory procedures.
Further research is required on how best to integrate the wealth of data
that exists in historical texts with the desire to produce effective
herbal products for the modern world.
Graphical abstract
Keywords
- Chinese herbal medicine;
- Historical review;
- Clinical trial;
- Urinary tract diseases;
- Historical ethnopharmacology;
- History
- Corresponding author. Tel.:
+44 7961911811.
Copyright © 2015 Published by Elsevier Ireland Ltd.
