Traditional herbal medicine, pharmacology rnand complementary alternative medicine (CAM):rn a preface to this special issue on herbal drugs

摘要

@@In China, our ancient human civilization has long used plants and other natural products, and their extracts for both healing and poisoning. The understanding of interactions between drugs and living systems was acquired via generations of knowledge accumulation based on empirical observations. This form of healing, also well documented to exist in many other cultural civilizations via a long historical experimentation, has eventually evolved itself from an art form into a scientific modality, now known as pharmacology. This recognition of a formal discipline of medicine occurred only about a century ago following the declaration of Flexner Report in the North America in 1910. The report proclaimed that the practice of medicine should be based on scientific evidence rather than empiricism. The emergence of synthetic organic chemistry facilitating the discovery of new healing chemicals and the rapid development of physiological and biochemical sciences (often dependent on pharmacological tools) have further solidified pharmacology as a mainstream basic medical science. For long decades since the Flexner's report, the empirically based folk medicine has rapidly been replaced by the scientifically based medicine, which is often referred to as the mainstream medicine (and thus becomes a traditional/conventional medicine itself).