Regulating Traditional Chinese Medicine

[GrahamB]

Cannot.....resist......

[D_Glenn]

"You probably have had a headache sometime in your life, and chances are you will take some kind of medicine to ease your pain. The medicine you will take will most likely be a relative of aspirin.

You may also have taken aspirin or its relatives for other problems, like inflammation or fever but did you know that about 80 billion aspirin tablets are taken per year for these problems, as well as many others? For example, millions of people take aspirin to help prevent heart attacks.

Aspirin is a member of a family of chemicals called salicylates

One of the first and most influential physicians, Hippocrates, wrote about a bitter powder extracted from willow bark that could ease aches and pains and reduce fevers as long ago as the fifth century B.C. In the 1700s, a scientist by the name of Reverend Edmund Stone wrote about the success of the bark of the willow in the cure of fevers with aches. With a bit of chemical detective work, scientists found out that the part of willow bark that was (1) bitter and (2) good for fever and pain is a chemical known as salicin.

It was a pharmacist known as Leroux who showed in 1829 that salicin is this active willow ingredient and your body converts this ingredient after it is eaten to another chemical, salicylic acid.

An Italian chemist by the name of Piria made salicylic acid, from salicin and for many years it was used in high doses to treat pain and swelling in diseases like arthritis and to treat fever.

A German chemist Felix Hoffmann, who worked for the chemical company Friedrich Bayer & Co. wanted to find a chemical that wouldn't be so hard on your stomach lining; reasoning that salicylic acid may be irritating because it is an acid. He put the compound through a couple of chemical reactions that covered up one of the acidic parts with an acetyl group, converting it to acetylsalicylic acid (ASA). He found that ASA could reduce fever and relieve pain and swelling, but also believed it was better for your stomach and worked even better than salicylic acid.

Over the next hundred years, ASA would fall in and out of favour, and at least two new families of medicines would be derived from it, and innumerable research articles would be published about aspirin.

No one completely understands how pain works. Actually, a lot is known about pain, but the more we find out the more questions arise.

Pain is really something you feel in your brain. Let’s say you hit your finger with a hammer. The part of your finger that is damaged has nerve endings in it -- these are little detectors in your joints and your skin that feel things like heat, vibration, touch, and, of course, big crushing shocks like being hit with a hammer. There are different receptors for each of these types of sensations. The damaged tissue in your finger also releases some chemicals that make those nerve endings register the crushing shock even stronger -- like turning up the volume on your stereo so you can hear it better. Some of these chemicals are prostaglandins, and working cells in the damaged tissues make these chemicals using an enzyme called cyclooxygenase 2 (COX-2).

Because of the prostaglandins, the nerve endings that are involved now send a strong signal through nerves in your hand, then through your arm, up your neck and into your brain, where your mind decides this signal means, "HEY! PAIN!" The prostaglandins seem to contribute just a portion of the total signal that means pain, but this portion is an important one. In addition, prostaglandins not only help you to feel the pain of the damaged finger, but they also cause the finger to swell up and to bathe the tissues in fluid from your blood that will protect it and help it to heal. (This is a simplified version of the pain story.) This pathway works very well as far as telling you your finger is hurt. The pain serves a purpose here: It reminds you that your finger is damaged and that you need to be careful with it and not use it until it's healed. The problem is that, sometimes, things hurt without the hammer or for any other good reason. Sometimes you get a headache possibly because your scalp and neck muscles are contracted from stress or because a blood vessel in your brain has a spasm. Many people have arthritis, which is swelling and pain in the joints such as the knuckles or knees, and this problem can not only make people uncomfortable, it can damage the joints permanently. And many women have pain in their abdomens during their periods, usually known as cramps, for no known useful reason. These processes appear to involve prostaglandins as well.

Aspirin helps these problems by stopping cells from making prostaglandins. Remember the enzyme, COX-2? It is a protein made by your body's cells whose job it is to take chemicals floating around in your tissues and turn them into prostaglandins.

COX-2 can be found in lots of normal tissues, but much more of it is made in tissue that has been damaged in some way. Aspirin, sticks to COX-2 and won't let it do its job. So by taking aspirin, you don't stop the problem that's causing the pain, like the tight muscles in your scalp, or the cramping in your abdomen, or the hammer-damaged finger. But it does "lower the volume" of the pain signals getting through your nerves to your brain, because Cox-2 can’t produce the prostaglandins that send the signal to your brain. Got it?

So how does aspirin know how to get to where the pain is? Well it doesn't! When you take aspirin, it dissolves in your stomach or the next part of the digestive tract, the small intestine, and your body absorbs it there. Then it goes into your bloodstream and it goes through your entire body. Although it is everywhere, it only works where there are prostaglandins being made, which includes the area where it hurts.

As with almost all chemicals, your body has ways of getting rid of aspirin. In this case, your liver, stomach, and other organs change aspirin to... surprise! Salicylic acid! This chemical then slowly gets changed a bit more by the liver, which sticks other chemicals onto the salicylic acid so that your kidneys, can filter it out of your blood and send it out in your urine. This whole process takes about four to six hours, so that’s why you need to take another pill every 4 to 6 hours to keep the effect going.

The problem with the fact that aspirin goes through your entire bloodstream is that your body needs prostaglandins for some reasons. One place they are useful is in the stomach. It turns out another enzyme called COX-1 makes a prostaglandin that keeps your stomach lining nice and thick. Aspirin stops COX-1 from working (it keeps most prostaglandins from being made), and your stomach lining gets thin, allowing the digestive juice inside to irritate it. This is probably the biggest reason why aspirin and its relatives may upset your stomach.

Over the last few decades, it has been found that aspirin's action of stopping prostaglandin production has effects on things besides pain, inflammation, and the stomach. Some types of prostaglandins cause tiny particles in your blood (platelets) to stick together to form a blood clot. By inhibiting prostaglandin production, aspirin slows down clot production. Although this can be bad, such as with a bloody nose, blood clots can be damaging as well, such as in causing heart attacks

Like all medicines, aspirin has side effects on your body that you don't want. Like, if you hit your finger with a hammer and it's bleeding, an aspirin may help the pain and swelling, but the wound may take longer to clot and stop bleeding. Also, it can be very upsetting to your stomach, especially at high doses.

Also Aspirin isn't used these days in children with fevers since research has suggested that aspirin given to kids with flu, chickenpox, or other viral sicknesses may cause a potentially deadly problem called Reye syndrome.

For these reasons, chemists have found other chemicals closely related to aspirin that have some of its good effects and lack some of its bad effects. Ibuprofen and naproxen (Motrin and Naprosyn) also treat pain, swelling and fever, but they seem to have less of an effect on platelets than aspirin does. These medicines are called the non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) because they decrease swelling but they aren't steroids, which are the most potent anti-inflammatory chemicals we have. Another family of medicines related to aspirin includes acetaminophen (Tylenol), which decreases fevers and pain, but it doesn't affect either swelling or your stomach as much as the true NSAIDs do."


Just think about the poor saps who keep taking aspirin to ease the pain of an ulcer, when it's actually the aspirin that's causing it.


.

[Darth Rock&Roll]

D_Glenn

tincture of leopardsbane (arnica montana) is the drug that is used actually for centuries for internal and external relief of blood stasis.
It is known exactly how it works.

I don't think the homeopathic version is recommended because...well that's just fucking water!! lol

homeopathy is rot. It's only use is the relief of psychosomatic aspects. After that, it does nothing.

Herbalism is not homeopathy and Homeopathy is not Naturopathy either. It is a separate little pile of stuff far and away from any actual practice of medicine. lol

[yusuf]

hi

I am well into a Chinese medicine degree, after having coming from scientific background... the Guardian article referenced in the oP is pure bullshit when it comes to underlying understanding... from a scientific point of view tcm is a classic form of cybernetics/systems theory.. Goldacre presented something like 'the spleen is the root of post heaven essence' which he ridiculed as being faith based and bad science.. his analysis didn;t even consider that tcm uses terms such as spleen as a system, of functions, actions, form, pathology etc etc.. essence is also an amalgamated term.. so he dismisses what he doesn;t understand.. and in a thoroughly unscientific way..

yusuf

[Darth Rock&Roll]

I wonder if he'll ever do an article about malpractice in the UK involving doctors and the thousands of cases whereby they accidentally kill their patients because of wrong surgery, messed up surgery, wrong diagnosis, bad prescriptions and so on.

However, this one case, which just happened to be a high profile person was used to address the issue of regulation.
Which in turn is a correct thing despite Goldacre's apparent intention when writing the original piece.

so yeah, regulate the shit out of it same as any other health profession practice. It only makes sense.

Nobody in a civilized nation should be practicing medicine without a thorough schooling in the knowledge and understanding of medicine.

And your credentials must be on par with the nation within which you practice.

It seems like a no brainer right?

[D_Glenn]

D_Glenn

tincture of leopardsbane (arnica montana) is the drug that is used actually for centuries for internal and external relief of blood stasis.
It is known exactly how it works.

Really? For centuries they've taken a toxic substance internally?


The Western medical surgeons recommend using the topical gels/lotions externally and internally using the homeopathic pills.


.

[somatai]

regulation is bunk and rots the spirit of practice........innovation, play and creative inspiration are essential for healing, regulating things into the category of techniques and facts just plain old sucks

[mrtoes]

Thanks for the info Doc and Michael.

Somatai, play and creative inspiration is great and I hear the problems with excessive regulation but when you're dealing with people's health there needs to be some degree of quality control and a process by way of which you determine what works and what doesn't. Or who is competent and ready to practice and who needs to go back to school. Surely the only remaining question is whether the industry is self regulated or whether individual treatments are validated by external bodies, which I understand from Michael may not be appropriate when viewing TCM as "everything working together". I can understand how excessive external regulation could be harmful if not applied appropriately, of course.

No-one wants quack doctors running around having done a week long courses and setting themselves up as health care professionals, which is probably the background behind the incident in the original article.

Yusuf, didn't realise you were training in Chinese Medicine (get away from computers good idea) how is the industry regulated in the UK, is it self regulated like Osteopathy? (a profession I have a lot of respect for btw)

Matthew.

[AllanF]

As someone who's wife is a Dr of TCM...i agree with the double blind test. I had noted that MediChi (i think) have teamed up with Cambridge Uni to find out what the active components are int TCM...why this wasn't done before is beyond me. Hell the West did it with Willow bark over 150 years ago. And now we have aspirin!

[somatai]

mechanisim is not the answer and the more they try and squeeze tcm into a box to fit in with what we "know" the more they damage it.

[yusuf]

Derek i gree to some extent but we have absolute charlatans here posing as CM doctors.. i had one stick 13 needles in me last year, in all the big points like hegu, qi hai, san yin jiao etc etc.. it totally fucked me up for a week ..

Yusuf, didn't realise you were training in Chinese Medicine (get away from computers good idea) how is the industry regulated in the UK, is it self regulated like Osteopathy? (a profession I have a lot of respect for btw)

Matthew.

Hey Matt..yep i keep it quiet..

tcm is supposedly self regulating but we have real bullshit being promulgated. i have talked to a lot of the graduates of westminister and london college of acupuncture. a lot of them talk as if they know a lot but are not able to provide a sensible treatment strategy, or explanations of how and why stuff happens in t he body in any sort of systematic way, both traits of good medicine whichever tradition you come from.. from an eastern (Arabic, Indian or CHinese) medicine the practitioner should also be in touch with their own body.. i ahven;t een many tcm people in the uk who are able to exhibit a body conditioned by the rigours of training medical chi gong etc etc...

and the worst thing is we have hoardes of charlatans who pretend to know tcm just because they are chinese and wear a white lab coat

(

[mrtoes]

I'm sorry to hear that Yusuf. I'd like to ask you more about it, but I'll leave it till next weekend.

Matthew.

[Michael]

Big Pharma researcher admits to faking dozens of research studies for Pfizer, Merck

pasted for your convenience due to free registration requirement

NaturalNews.com printable article
Originally published February 18 2010
Big Pharma researcher admits to faking dozens of research studies for Pfizer, Merck (opinion)
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor

(NaturalNews) It's being called the largest research fraud in medical history. Dr. Scott Reuben, a former member of Pfizer's speakers' bureau, has agreed to plead guilty to faking dozens of research studies that were published in medical journals.

Now being reported across the mainstream media is the fact that Dr. Reuben accepted a $75,000 grant from Pfizer to study Celebrex in 2005. His research, which was published in a medical journal, has since been quoted by hundreds of other doctors and researchers as "proof" that Celebrex helped reduce pain during post-surgical recovery. There's only one problem with all this: No patients were ever enrolled in the study!

Dr. Scott Reuben, it turns out, faked the entire study and got it published anyway.

It wasn't the first study faked by Dr. Reuben: He also faked study data on Bextra and Vioxx drugs, reports the Wall Street Journal.

As a result of Dr. Reuben's faked studies, the peer-reviewed medical journal Anesthesia & Analgesia was forced to retract 10 "scientific" papers authored by Reuben. The Day of London reports that 21 articles written by Dr. Reuben that appear in medical journals have apparently been fabricated, too, and must be retracted.

After being caught fabricating research for Big Pharma, Dr. Reuben has reportedly signed a plea agreement that will require him to return $420,000 that he received from drug companies. He also faces up to a 10-year prison sentence and a $250,000 fine.

He was also fired from his job at the Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Mass. after an internal audit there found that Dr. Reuben had been faking research data for 13 years. (http://www.theday.com/article/20100115/ ... 19833/1047)

Business as usual in Big Pharma
What's notable about this story is not the fact that a medical researcher faked clinical trials for the pharmaceutical industry. It's not the fact that so-called "scientific" medical journals published his fabricated studies. It's not even the fact that the drug companies paid this quack close to half a million dollars while he kept on pumping out fabricated research.

The real story here is that this is business as usual in the pharmaceutical industry.

Dr. Reuben's actions really aren't that extraordinary. Drug companies bribe researchers and doctors as a routine matter. Medical journals routinely publish false, fraudulent studies. FDA panel members regularly rely on falsified research in making their drug approval decisions, and the mainstream media regularly quotes falsified research in reporting the news.

Fraudulent research, in other words, is widespread in modern medicine. The pharmaceutical industry couldn't operate without it, actually. It is falsified research that gives the industry its best marketing claims and strongest FDA approvals. Quacks like Dr Scott Reuben are an important part of the pharmaceutical profit machine because without falsified research, bribery and corruption, the industry would have very little research at all.

Pay special attention to the fact that the Anesthesia & Analgesia medical journal gladly published Dr. Reuben's faked studies even though this journal claims to be a "scientific" medical journal based on peer review. Funny, isn't it, how such a scientific medical journal gladly publishes fraudulent research with data that was simply invented by the study author. Perhaps these medical journals should be moved out of the non-fiction section of university libraries and placed under science fiction.

Remember, too, that all the proponents of pharmaceuticals, vaccines and mammograms ignorantly claim that their conventional medicine is all based on "good science." It's all scientific and trustworthy, they claim, while accusing alternative medicine of being "woo woo" wishful thinking and non-scientific hype. Perhaps they should have a quick look in the mirror and realize it is their own system of quack medicine that's based largely on fraudulent research, bribery and corruption.

You just have to laugh, actually, when you hear pushers of vaccines and pharmaceuticals claim their medicine is "scientific" while natural medicine is "unproven." Sure it's scientific -- about as scientific as the storyline in a Scooby Doo cartoon, or as credible as the medical license of a six-year-old kid who just received a "let's play doctor" gift set for Christmas. Many pharmaceutical researchers would have better careers as writers of fiction novels rather than scientific papers.

For all those people who ignorantly claim that modern pharmaceutical science is based on "scientific evidence," just give them these three words: Doctor Scott Reuben.

Drug companies support fraudulent research
Don't forget that the drug companies openly supported Dr. Scott Reuben's research. They paid him, in fact, to keep on fabricating studies.

The drug companies claim to be innocent in all this, but behind the scenes they had to have known what was going on. Dr. Reuben's research was just too consistently favorable to drug company interests to be scientifically legitimate. If a drug company wanted to "prove" that their drug was good for some new application, all they had to do was ask Dr. Reuben to come up with the research (wink wink). "Here's another fifty thousand dollars to study whether our drug is good for post-surgical pain (wink)."

And before long, Dr. Reuben would magically materialize a brand new study that just happened to "prove" exactly what the sponsoring drug company wanted to prove. Advocates of western medicine claim they don't believe in magic, but when it comes to clinical trials, they actually do: All the results they wish to see just magically appear as long as the right researcher gets paid to materialize the results out of thin air, much like waving a magician's wand and chanting, "Abra cadabra... let there be RESEARCH DATA!"

Shazam! The research data materializes just like that. It all gets written up into a "scientific" paper that also magically gets published in medical journals that fail to ask a single question that might exposed the research fraud.

I guess these people believe in magic after all, huh? Where science is lacking, a little "research magic" conveniently fills the void.

The whole system makes a mockery of real science. It is a system operated by criminals who fabricate whatever "scientific evidence" they need in order to get published in medical journals and win FDA approval for drugs that they fully realize are killing people.

What is "Evidence-Based Medicine?"
The fact that a researcher like Dr. Reuben could so successfully fabricate fraudulent study data, then get it published in peer-reviewed science journals, and get away with it for 13 years sheds all kinds of new light on what's really behind "evidence-based medicine."

The recipe for evidence-based medicine is quite simple: Fabricate the evidence! Get it published in any mainstream medical journal. Then you can quote the fabricated evidence as "fact!"

When pushers of pharmaceuticals and vaccines resort to quoting "evidence-based medicine" as their defense, keep in mind that much of their so-called evidence has been entirely fabricated. When they claim their branch of toxic chemical medicine is based on "real science," what they really mean is that it's based on fraudulent science but they've all secretly agreed to call it "real science." When they claim to have "scientific facts" supporting their position, what they really mean is that those "facts" were fabricated by criminal researchers being paid bribes by the drug companies.

"Evidence-based medicine," it turns out, hardly exists anymore. And even if it does, how do you know which studies are real vs. which ones were fabricated? If a trusted, well-paid researcher can get his falsified papers published for 13 years in top-notch science journals -- without getting caught by his peers -- then what does that say about the credibility of the entire peer-review science paper publishing process?

Here's what is says: "Scientific medicine" is a total fraud.

And this fraud isn't limited to Dr Scott Reuben, either. Remember: he engaged in routine research fraud for 13 years before being caught. There are probably thousands of other scientists engaged in similar research fraud right now who haven't yet been caught in the act. Their fraudulent research papers have no doubt already been published in "scientific" medical journals. They've been quoted in the popular press. They've been relied on by FDA decision makers to approve drugs as "safe and effective" for widespread use.

And yet underneath all this, there's nothing more than fraud and quackery. Sure, there may be some legitimate studies mixed in with all the fraud, but how can we tell the difference?

How are we to trust this system that claims to have a monopoly on scientific truth but in reality is a front for outright scientific fraud?

Keep up the great work, Dr Reuben
Thank you, Dr Scott Reuben, for showing us the truth about the pharmaceutical industry, the research quackery, the laughable "scientific" journals and the bribery and corruption that characterizes the pharmaceutical industry today. You have done more to shed light on the true nature of the drug industry than a thousand articles on NaturalNews.com ever could.

Keep up the good work. After paying your fine and serving a little jail time, I'm sure your services will be in high demand at all the top drug companies that need yet more "scientific" studies to be fabricated and submitted to the medical journals.

You may be a dishonest, disgusting human being to most of the world, but you're a huge asset to the pharmaceutical industry and they need you back! There are more studies that need to be fabricated soon; more false papers that need to be published and more dangerous drugs that need to receive FDA approval. Hurry!

Because if there's one place that extreme dishonesty is richly rewarded, it's in the pharmaceutical industry, where poisons are approved as medicines and fiction is published as the truth.

Sources for this story include:
http://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/loca ... 27667.html

http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2010/01/15/ ... rck-drugs/

http://www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealt ... hics/17985

http://www.theday.com/article/20100115/ ... 19833/1047

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[Bob]

Michael, thank you for posting that--very striking piece. I also will repost the placebo effect here:

Placebo effect broader than thought: study

Fri Feb 19, 6:22 am ET

SYDNEY (AFP) – Drugs may cure the sick, but patients can also benefit from the warmth and wisdom of the doctors treating them, according to a new Australian study into the impact of placebos released Friday.

Sydney University's Damien Finniss led a team of international experts who reviewed scientific papers on the impact of placebos, or dummy pills used in control tests, dating back to the 1700s.

They found that not only could placebos be helpful on their own, but that much medical practice -- even something as simple as administering a drug -- had a similarly comforting impact.

"Most people still think of placebo as an effect which occurs in some people when they receive a sham or dummy treatment, usually when studying the effectiveness of a new treatment," Finniss said. "But we've moved past that."

Finniss said the research, which has been published in medical journal The Lancet, showed treatments that engage the mind can potentially promote the body's natural healing mechanisms.

"Our research reveals that placebo effects can occur in routine medical practice across a wide range of medical conditions -- and these effects can be therapeutically powerful."

Finniss said some studies had shown that patients who were given a painkiller that was later replaced with a placebo still continued to report a lessening in their pain, a finding confirmed by brain scans.

Another found that patients benefited more from receiving a drug via an injection from a doctor than via a computerised pump.

"You don't have to give a dummy pill to get a placebo effect," Finniss told AFP, adding that the context of the treatment was often just as important.

But what if you have little faith in your doctor's ability to help you?

"Hypothetically, you may be at risk of less of a placebo effect," Finniss said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100219/hl ... 0219113049

[Michael]

Glad you liked it From my layman's perspective, I'm not sure how double-blind testing as I understand it would be utilized in Chinese Medicine or other holistic systems because the relationship between symptom and cause is not consistent between patients in medical systems capable of treating the full spectrum of diseases. Other kinds of testing would be fine and have led to the use of Chinese Medicine diagnosis coupled with newer types of therapies like this one.