Chinese Medicine Minus the Enigma

By Henry Ehrlich

This past Sunday, the New York Times published a piece by a philosophy professor named Stephen T. Asma. “The Enigma of Chinese Medicine” recounts the professor’s own experience with illness while in China and being treated with traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), starting with the ingestion of fresh turtle blood with grain alcohol. Much of the article centers on the concept of “falsifiability” and how we distinguish science from pseudoscience.

Asma (okay, I love the name, too) writes, “We like to think that a rigorous application of logic will eliminate kooky ideas. But it doesn’t….The issue of alternative medicine, especially Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), brings fresh passion to the demarcation problem. Americans are gravitating to acupuncture and herbal medicines (less so the zoological pharmacology, like my turtle blood), but we crave some scientific validation for these ancient practices. And the Chinese are themselves looking for ways to legitimize TCM to the Western world, and distinguish it from the more superstitious aspects of traditional culture.”

The publication of this article creates a convenient opportunity for announcing that for the past year, I have been working on a book called Food Allergies: Traditional Chinese Medicine, Western Science, and the Search for a Cure. It describes the work of Dr. Xiu-Min Li and her colleagues at Mount Sinai over the past 20 years or so to adapt certain Chinese formulas to treat food allergies, which are not described in the classical TCM literature, as well as other allergic diseases, and to prove these medicines by western scientific standards. Avid readers of this website will remember a piece done for us a few years ago by Dr. Li herself, and more recently she was one of the subjects, along with Dr. Kari Nadeau, of the post “History is Made at Lunch.”

The book will be published early next year. Most of it tells the story of FAHF-2 (Food Allergy Herbal Formula-2) from a moment in the early 1990s when Dr. Li made it a mission, both personal and professional, to help food allergy patients through the use of TCM, with the collaboration and support of Dr. Hugh Sampson. Today FAHF-2 is in human efficacy trials as the most advanced investigational drug in the history of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), part of the NIH. It has been my great pleasure to tell this story, which not only has implications for allergies, but for other disorders where the immune system is involved.

As the book will explain, TCM and western standards of proof are not enemies. You don’t have to believe in meridians, qi, and feng shui, because there are no eastern molecules and western molecules. Thousands of years of R&D are waiting to be tested. Dr. Li is showing us how to do it.

{Note: this book is now available. To read more about it and find out how to order it, click here.}