{"id":20463,"date":"2025-09-17T16:33:47","date_gmt":"2025-09-17T20:33:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/valuecare.wpgamma.com\/?p=20463"},"modified":"2025-09-17T16:33:47","modified_gmt":"2025-09-17T20:33:47","slug":"the-fda-and-alternative-medicine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/valuecare.wpgamma.com\/index.php\/2025\/09\/17\/the-fda-and-alternative-medicine\/","title":{"rendered":"The FDA and Alternative Medicine"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"spoiler\">\n<p><em>From the WSJ \u2013<a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/public\/us\">\u00a0http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/public\/us?<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<p>HONG KONG \u2014 Chinese doctors have long experimented with combinations of herbs to cure disease. If a plant extract helped to fight an infection, why bother trying to figure out which molecule did the trick? It worked, and that\u2019s what counted.<\/p>\n<p>By contrast, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, one of the world\u2019s most stringent drug watchdogs, for decades has looked askance at most herbal medicines. The focus in Western pharmacology is finding the single molecule that cures a disease. Pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer and Merck spend billions of dollars combing through huge libraries of compounds to find the elusive blockbuster therapy.<\/p>\n<p>The two approaches boil down to a simple question: Is it better to attack disease, as the Western world does, with a silver bullet \u2014 the one substance whose potency has been pinpointed? Or should treatments be administered, as the Chinese method dictates, by aiming a group of agents at the problem \u2014 the shotgun approach?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From the WSJ \u2013\u00a0http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/public\/us? HONG KONG \u2014 Chinese doctors have long experimented with combinations of herbs to cure disease. If a plant extract helped to fight an infection, why bother trying to figure out which molecule did the trick? It worked, and that\u2019s what counted. By contrast, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, one of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alternative-therapies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/valuecare.wpgamma.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/valuecare.wpgamma.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/valuecare.wpgamma.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valuecare.wpgamma.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valuecare.wpgamma.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20463"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/valuecare.wpgamma.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20463\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/valuecare.wpgamma.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valuecare.wpgamma.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valuecare.wpgamma.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}