| [ sciEncE ] in KIDS 글 쓴 이(By): guest (guest) <phoebe.med.buffa> 날 짜 (Date): 2001년 11월 30일 금요일 오전 03시 45분 18초 제 목(Title): Re: 한의학...^^ I am sorry that I started writing at this closing moment and write in English. I dont want to argue or debate about very critical subject, but I want to say about my opinion. First of all, I should say that I have a bit of experience both with western and oriental style medicine. What I felt ( it is not exactly right word in a scientific sense of mind) about the oriental medicine and the problem is that it needs to be developed further from this current situation. Right now the oriental medicine is in somewhat mysterious status. I think unveiling its mysterious and superstitious status is the first step for the scientific development of Korean traditional medicine. Broadly it can be divided into two big categories like you guys in here said; the herbal medicine and acupuncture. For acupuncture as one example, you guys might have some experience of using needle when you are in dyspepsia ( It is part of acupuncture which follows the same traditionally believed theory ). How does it work? Usually, when you are in such a status, your blood are concentrated on stomach according to the theory ( traditional unproved theory ) that blood always accompanies the Ki. By using needle, you can disperse the congested Ki in stomach to other places by artificially giving a way for blood to go. It is not well proven in scientific terms. But I think we can test indirectly like other western style method of finding out some correlation between two related events. But in that case, first of all, you need to make a very firm logic to prove it. ( I guess this is not that difficult in a sense ). The other part of traditional medicine is about its herbal medicine. Well, there are a lot of mysterious things about those herbal medicines, which can be misled by traditional doctors. In Japan, it is rather well developed. First of all they analyze the ingredient of each herb by chemical analysis. (This approach is based on the hypothesis that all the effects of herbal medicine is from the right mixture of its ingredients. Well, it makes sense. Like food, the herbal medicine has its own season to be harvested. Maybe in that harvest time, the particular ingredient of its herb has its peak and that way the ratio between the ingredient is quite right to make the best result. ) Like biologists who major in finding the right culture condition for cell growth, we can do the same approach onto this herbal medicine. Let me say a bit about culture(growing) of the human or animal cells. For example, you want to grow particular human brain cells ( it can be neuron or something else) or liver cells. How can you do?? The traditional western biologists thought that blood did its important role in maintaining such a certain cell type because factors in blood can act as nutrients or growth factors for nurturing them. So, blood system is kind of high way of conveying those nutrients into cells or tissuesSo when they designed the culturing media( something like boonyoo for babies ) , they always mixed those with blood. By that way, they could know the certain compositions in blood such as growth factors, hormones, and peptides are important and necessary for those cells or tissues to grow and divide. Likewise, we can apply the same approach into this herbal system. First of all, we need to know what exactly the particular herb has by doing NMR, mass, and IR analysis. ( Usually Japanese have done a lot of this job) For example about ginseng, it has a lot of different glucocorticoid compounds in it( if my memory serves right) and it as known that those are important ingredients for its own action. And we also need to know the rough composition of it. That way, we can approach the herbal medicine a bit more systematically. Some of you said that sometimes herbal medicine cured those who couldnt be cured by the western style medicine. Well, in a sense, western style approach has its own limit. The drugs are made by the human being. They have usually focused on only one thing or one effect by the drug. They sometimes dont know what will happen in a real system ( even though they do such a clinical test before its commercial usage) But in a way, natural products afford a good opportunity to study important biology. If the natural product is used or abuled by human beings, finding its biological target(s) is all the more significant. But the problem of the natural medicine is that they dont usually have their own specific role on human body. They usually have very broad and general effects. What these ( less toxicity and general effect) mean is that their action in body is not target specific, they rather may affect on our own IMMUNE system rather than onto target tissue or cells. That maybe the reason that sometimes we can have a big effect by using those herbal medicine. Well, it is not that bad because one of the approaches on cancer therapy is to increase our own immune activity to kill cancer cell or something else ( incuding AIDS of course) But the thing is that right now, the western style approach is much more closer on that case by using molecular biology and genetic engineering because they use much more DIRECT way to cure the disease. But we cant neglect the importance of herbal medicine. Sometimes for me to see, those herbal medicine is nothing more than nutrition or food. Well, if we cant find its own scientific importance or necessity, then we can approach this rather different way. |