From the WSJ – http://online.wsj.com/public/us?
HONG KONG — 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’s what counted.
By contrast, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, one of the world’s 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.
The two approaches boil down to a simple question: Is it better to attack disease, as the Western world does, with a silver bullet — 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 — the shotgun approach?
