The State Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine has announced that it is going to examine "potential toxic side effects" of Chinese traditional medicine.
Aiming to prevent people from being poisoned by unsafe traditional treatments, the examination will cover 72 kinds of herbs in the Chinese Pharmacopoeia that have certain toxicity, according to CCTV International Thursday.
Meanwhile, herb processing and combination and mixture of herb in the traditional medicine will also be examined, said the report.
The expert team for the administration will mainly conduct basic experiments on selected herb and search for historical side-effects records. Then they will conclude on what herb can be used to make medicine and work out suggestions for taking traditional medicine.
For thousands of years, Chinese medicine makers have been processing herb with traditional methods. They would mix or combine several herb into certain medicine so as to reduce or counteract their toxicity.
However, modern medical sciences have had not much study and research on these methods and have had no rules to regulate traditional medicine plants in this regard. Therefore, some plants extended the usage of the medicine or even sold the medicine as tonic, which caused side-effects to medicine takers, said the report.
(Xinhua News Agency April 22, 2005)
