Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) Drove Anti Malarial Drug

Traditional Chinese Medicine is a method built on medical practice that includes various forms of herbal medicine, acupuncture, massage (Tui na), exercise (qigong), and dietary therapy, but recently also predisposed by modern Western medicine. TCM is widely used in China and is becoming more available in Europe and North America.

Chinese medical texts for references to herbs and recipes have been used to fight against malarial type of symptoms such as fever, rigors and headache. They systematically screened the well recognized texts and sifted through more than 2,000 herb preparations of traditional Chinese herbs and from these 380 herb extracts were identified and tested them on mice which are being infected by malaria parasites.

Traditional Chinese Medicine

Out of these, the common Chinese plant sweet wormwood (Artemesia annua) was prescribed in 4th century. Tu’s team then started to use different solvents to separate different chemicals from sweet wormwood. They tested these chemicals in opposition to mice infected by malaria parasites until they identified a compound that at a very low dose can destroy the parasites faster than other antimalarial drugs. The discovery of artemisinin has made a huge difference in the management of malaria treatment in the world.

Separating different classes of chemicals in plants requires strategy and patience and produce pure single compound such as artemisinin in a practical quantity from a plant with a higher potency than a synthetic drug is a major accomplishment. This is often done using a solvent to dissolve certain chemicals from plant material and then slowly evaporating the resulting solution to isolate the compounds. By repeating the process using different solvents it is possible to separate different chemicals.

Conclusion

TCM is a scientific superstitious view of biology and illness it is strange and unscientific to treat TCM as anything else. Any individual diagnostic or treatment method within TCM should be evaluated according to standard principles of science and science-based medicine, and not given special treatment.

Journal of Integrative Medicine & Therapy

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