Dr Steve's BOTTOM LINE: I couldn't have said it better myself. Although there are a lot of scientific gobbledegook words in this study, proper use of science can only help. With all due respect to purists who do not want to explore what individual components in TCM herbs do, in order to gain more credibility and establish safety this must be done. Remember, it just adds information. What one does with the information is up to them. Want to know what works.....really? Or maybe what to avoid?

Look, some stuff has side effects. That's just as true for herbs and supplements as it is for drugs, and it can be just as severe! Also, are you up for wasting money on stuff that does not work, especially in this economy? From everything I have been observing, this whole movement is only adding to the recognition that ancient traditional and widely accepted but unproven herbal therapies are indeed grounded in scientific basis. Again, it is worth repeating that finding the toxic components and considering their removal can only enhance the overall benefit.

Recent analytical approaches in quality control of traditional Chinese medicines--a review.

Anal Chim Acta. 2010 Jan 4;657(1):9-18

Authors: Jiang Y, David B, Tu P, Barbin Y

Traditional Chinese medicines (TCMs) are gaining more and more attention all over the world, due to their specific theory and long historical clinical practice. But the uncontrollable quality is a bottleneck for its modernization and globalization. This paper reviewed the recent analytical methods in the quality control of TCMs, including screening strategies of bioactive markers from TCMs through biochromatographic methods, the traditional chromatographic methods, DNA methods, as well as the spectroscopic methods, including FT-IR, NIR and NMR. The comprehensive methods, such as fingerprint and multi-component quantification are emphasized; hyphenated techniques, like HPLC-MS, GC-MS, CE-MS, LC-NMR, chemometric methods, and combination of chemical and biological methods, such as biofingerprint, metabolic fingerprint are now more and more widely used in TCMs. In a few word, the analysis and quality control of TCMs are moving towards an integrative and comprehensive direction, in order to better address the inherent holistic nature of TCMs.