by Carl Balingit
on May 13, 2016
© Dan Backman [flickr.com/dbackmansfo] under CC BY 2.0
There are plusses and minuses to the lacking regulation of herbal products. If they were regulated as stringently as pharmaceuticals, they would never make it to market because the cost to do so would be prohibitive.
The reason for this consequence is that it typically requires a large investment to meet federal or state mandates. The only conceivable way to gain a return on such a sum is to monopolize your product; and a monopoly only comes effectively by way of a patent. Herbs in their raw or natural form cannot be patented. Therefore, they would attract zero seed money to continue their production.
So the benefit of the moderate regulations currently standing, is that herbs are still accessible. However, the disadvantage of the present state is that herbs are so accessible as to allow prescription (self-, or otherwise) without credentials.
There are occasionally media and institutional attacks on the safety of the supplement industry, including herbs—much of it sensational. This is not entirely unfounded because [continue reading…]
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herbs
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by Carl Balingit
on May 10, 2016
Personal Genome Project © PersonalGenomes.org [flickr.com/personalgenomes]. License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
A growing community of Chinese medicine scholars? Probably not, but…
Our bodies’ cells are constantly exposed to physical, chemical and temperature-related variables. Sometimes these variables breach the threshold for normal cell activity. When this occurs, it causes cellular damage.
But our bodies have innate intelligence, and much of our internal processes happen without our awareness. Such is the case with cellular repair. This occurs automatically, the instructions for which are coded in our DNA.
However, the repair process does not always occur as usual—evidenced by the existence of disease, wherein we are unable to repair damage from failing to adapt to noxious triggers. This breakdown may be that the offensive variable overwhelmed our adaptive capabilities, or that our DNA has mutated and thus lost the program for a specific repair sequence.
If the DNA program for cell death is damaged, then a mutated cell can continue to divide and spread, leading to cancer.
Chinese Medicine Context
The above concepts are encompassed by yin-yang theory—the basis of acupuncture and [continue reading…]
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genomics
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