Chinese Herb Quality and Safety
Many people have concerns about the safety and quality of Chinese herbs. The truth is, Chinese herbal medicine is incredibly safe when sourced properly and prescribed by a skilled and qualified practitioner.
So let’s break that down.
Chuan Bei Mu (Frillitaria) farm in Sichuan province. Many herbs must be sourced from the specific regions they are indigenous to, in order to yield the best medicinal results. The soil and climate of Sichuan produce the highest development of Chuan Bei Mu's therapeutic components.
Sourcing High Quality Herbs
Before I went to graduate school for Chinese Medicine, I studied botany and sustainable agriculture at UC Santa Cruz. I am well aware of the problems with chemical pesticides and environmental contaminants, so I only source Chinese herbs from companies that go above and beyond to ensure that they are providing safe, high quality herbal medicine and practicing environmental stewardship in the process.
We source our granule extracts from Evergreen Herbs, our raw herbs (whole or sliced dried herbs to be used for decoction or draft formulas) are from Spring Wind Herbs, and our capsule formulas come from Classical Pearls.
All three of these companies do extensive testing on their herbs to ensure they are potent and safe.
The first important test for any herbal product is confirming botanical identity - making sure it's the correct plant.
Our herbs underdo three testing methods to confirm identify: Organoleptic Visual Check, which is big words for having educated botanists looking at the physical characteristics of the plant and confirm its identity, microscopic cellular identity check, and lastly Thin Layer Chromatography (TLC), a state-of-the-art technique to analyze plant identity, chemistry, and potency.
Confirming the identity of the herb may seem pretty basic, but there have been numerous incidents in the US supplement industry involving companies selling products containing the wrong plant, in some cases toxic plants that were mis-identified!
In addition to verifying a plant’s identity, Thin Layer Chromatography is also used to confirm potency and active ingredients.
After identification comes testing for microbial contaminants.
Our herbs must pass tests for salmonella, yeast and mold, aflatoxins, E.coli, Enterobacteria and gram-negative bacteria.
Following that, they are screened for pesticides.
Evergreen and Classical Pearls test for over 100 pesticides. Spring Wind does the most extensive screening for pesticides, currently testing for over 350 pesticides and only providing herbs that pass screening with no pesticides detected. Spring Wind truly goes above and beyond in this area.
Next up is heavy metal testing.
Evergreen and Classical Pearls granule extracts must pass tests for total heavy metals and individual heavy metals (lead, cadmium, mercury, arsenic).
Raw herbs from Spring Wind are not tested for heavy metals, because it's not possible to do so.
This requires some explaining, so bear with me.
The reason that granule extracts can be tested for heavy metals has to do with how they are made. To make a granule extract of Dang Gui, for example, they will take 1000 lbs of raw herb Dang Gui and cook it in a giant pot of water to create a hot water extraction, or decoction.
The herbal medicine from the Dang Gui roots is now extracted into a solution.
The solution is then concentrated down and dried, and the chemistry of that whole batch is uniform.
You can take a sample, test it for heavy metals, and then determine that the whole batch is free of heavy metals.
On the other hand, if you have 1000 lbs of Dang Gui roots, and you can take one root out of the batch and test it, you can't claim that the rest of the batch has been tested, because it's not in solution. It’s not a uniform product. Each root is individual.
The organic kale, apples, and carrots you buy at the grocery store are not tested for heavy metals either - it just can’t be done on these types of products.
It’s important to remember that granule extracts that routinely pass heavy metal screening are made from raw Chinese herbs, which indicates that the raw herbs would pass, too, if they could be tested.
Spring Wind does have a line of granule extracts, made from their raw herbs, which pass heavy metal screening and their extensive pesticide screening. However at this time their granule line is not extensive enough for me to use as my primary granule extract source.
Spring Wind sources herbs from pristine and remote growing regions of China. Many herbs are still wild harvested, and herb farmers test their soil for heavy metal contamination.
Photos sent from one of Spring Wind's Ju Hua (Chrysanthemum) growers, from a small farm in Taiwan that grows without herbs without pesticides and chemical fertilizers.
Choosing the Correct Herbs
Using high-quality herbs is the first step in ensuring safe use of Chinese herbs.
The next step is in correctly prescribing them.
Chinese herbs are powerful medicines, which means they have specific actions and directions in the body. If you take the wrong herbs for your condition, you aren't likely to die but you may make yourself sicker.
This risk is easily avoided by seeing a qualified, skilled herbalist. Finding a skilled herbalist can be harder than you think. Chinese herbal medicine is a very difficult art to master.
In my practice I have seen a lot of ‘wrong treatment’, as we call it, by people self-prescribing herbs and even when the herbs have been prescribed by their acupuncturist, herbalist, naturopath, or other care provider.
It’s much easier to be wrong than right when prescribing Chinese herbs, especially if you lack the required skillset. It’s pretty much the definition of a shot in the dark!
In modern America, the most common mistakes are overuse of tonic herbs, such as Shu Di Huang/Sheng Di Huang, Si Wu Tang, Liu Wei Di Huang Wan, Ba Zhen Tang, and overuse of cold, bitter herbs like Yin Qiao San, Long Dan Xie Gan Tang, Ba Zheng San, Huang Lian, Zhi Zi.
These, when poorly prescribed, can often make a problem worse, or create a new one to go with it!
Herb Safety vs Drug Safety
Despite the pitfalls of wrong prescription, Chinese herbal medicine is nevertheless fundamentally safer than modern pharmaceutical drugs.
Let me explain why.
Each individual herb that we use contains hundreds of unique phytochemicals. Some of these compounds have similar actions, some of them have opposite physiologic actions that balance each other.
Pharmaceutical drugs are made by identifying an active ingredient in a plant, isolating it and concentrating it thousands of times over. This makes modern drugs very strong, and that's why they are valuable. By the same token, it also makes them less safe.
They don't work with your body to make something happen; they make it happen whether your body likes it or not. That's basically how we get side effects - the forceful and unilateral nature of drugs.
Herbs are fundamentally milder in action. Each herb has small amounts of many compounds, and our body is more able to take up what is helpful and excrete what is not needed.
To make it even more safe, in Chinese Medicine we don't just use single herbs. Instead of using 100 grams of one herb that has a particular physiologic effect, we will use 10 grams of 10 different herbs that all support the same goal but with different phytochemicals that do it in slightly different ways.
Chinese herbal medicine uses less force overall than modern pharmaceutical medicine, but, through a deep understanding of human physiology, is able to elegantly apply that smaller force in a way that causes profound effect.
One way to think about the difference between Chinese herbal medicine and modern pharmaceutical medicine is like this: imagine that a large boulder blocks your path and needs to be moved.
Using Chinese herbal medicine is like wedging a 2x4 between a smaller rock and the boulder and using leverage to roll the boulder out of the way. A modern drug is like blowing the boulder up with a stick of dynamite - it's fast and effective, but the large amount of force applied via explosion can cause collateral damage.
Some boulders require dynamite, many of them do not.
The Elephant in the Room
There's one more area that I think is important to address when it comes to Chinese herb safety and quality. I'm talking about the undeniable cultural undercurrent of xenophobia and Cold War Era propaganda that is still present in modern attitudes regarding everything Chinese.
Without any knowledge of the industry, people tend to assume that herbs from China would be less safe than herbs from the United States, which is far from the truth.
Granule extracts produced in China and Taiwan are held to very high standards, because they are being used in integrative medicine hospitals alongside modern pharmaceutical drugs.
Therefore, they are held to strict quality standards on par with pharmaceutical drug manufacturing standards.
Here in the U.S. the supplement industry is lagging far behind. Many herbal supplements made in the U.S. routinely fail the most basic test: having the correctly identified herbs in the product.
The industry here is improving, but we still have a long way to go regarding quality control in supplements (and don’t get me starting on beauty, skin and hair products).
Chinese herbal medicine is orders of magnitude safer than many over-the-counter medicines, common adulterants in foods, and environmental contaminants in everyday products we are exposed to.
To give some more context, every year in the United States more than 100,000 people die from correctly prescribed pharmaceutical medications.
That is a scary number, and makes no mention of incorrectly prescribed medications.
Guess how many people die each year from Chinese herbal medicine?
You nailed it: zero.
Many Americans unfortunately have a knee jerk reaction of suspicion towards anything Chinese. This is sad, and needs examination on many levels but in this instance we need to pause and consider the facts before letting unconscious bias make our health decisions for us.
Alright, stepping off my soapbox now.
I hope this article gave you a better understanding of how important the safety and efficacy of the herbs I use is to me, and put any and all of your concerns regarding herb safety to rest.
If you want to learn more about Chinese herbs, please check out my video Granules, Capsules & Drafts: Choosing the Best Herb Format for You, or About Chinese Medicine.
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