Nearly two-thirds of the Civil War's approximately 750,000 fatalities were caused by disease--a staggering fact for which the American medical profession was profoundly unprepared. In the years ...before the war, training for physicians in the United States was mostly unregulated, and medical schools' access to cadavers for teaching purposes was highly restricted. Shauna Devine argues that in spite of these limitations, Union army physicians rose to the challenges of the war, undertaking methods of study and experimentation that would have a lasting influence on the scientific practice of medicine.Though the war's human toll was tragic, conducting postmortems on the dead and caring for the wounded gave physicians ample opportunity to study and develop new methods of treatment and analysis, from dissection and microscopy to new research into infectious disease processes. Examining the work of doctors who served in the Union Medical Department, Devine sheds new light on how their innovations in the midst of crisis transformed northern medical education and gave rise to the healing power of modern health science.
From the height of colonialism in the mid-nineteenth century, through to the aftermath of the Second World War, nurses have been at the heart of colonial projects. They were ideally placed to ...insinuate the ‘improving’ culture of their employers into the local communities they served, and travelled in droves to far-flung parts of the globe to serve their country. Issues of gender, class and race permeate this book, as the complex relationships between nurses, their medical colleagues, governments and the populations they nursed are examined in detail, using case studies which draw on exciting new sources. Many of the chapters are based on first-hand accounts of nurses and reveal that not all were motivated by patriotic vigour or altruism, but went out in search of adventure. The book will be an essential read for colonial historians, as well as historians of gender and ethnicity.
Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), an ancient system of alternative medicine, played an active role in the prevention and control of COVID-19 in China. It improved the clinical symptoms of patients, ...reduced the mortality rate, improved the recovery rate, and effectively relieved the operating pressure on the national medical system during critical conditions. In light of the current global pandemic, TCM-related measures might open up a new channel in the control of COVID-19 in other countries and regions. Here, we summarize the TCM-related measures that were widely used in China, including TCM guidelines, the Wuchang pattern, mobile cabin hospitals, integrated treatment of TCM and modern medicine for critical patients, and non-medicine therapy for convalescent patients, and describe how TCM effectively treated patients afflicted with the COVID-19. Effective TCM therapies could, therefore, be recommended and practiced based on the existing medical evidence from increased scientific studies.
Internationalization of Traditional/Complementary Medicine (T&CM) products is important for initiating and sustaining developments in this field. Particularly for traditional Chinese medicines ...(TCMs), the global market continues to expand due to an interest in the potential clinical benefits of traditional approaches that are largely considered lower risk and lower cost than many conventional treatments. While the benefits of internationalization hold clear advantages for the business of T&CM products, keeping abreast of regulatory processes in different countries and regions that regularly revise market entry requirements is challenging. At present, the regulations of T&CM products are country specific and largely based on a risk-based assessment with a focus on protecting the consumer. To date, systematic analysis of these regulatory differences between countries and regions is limited. Publically available information about the legal requirements for the market entry of T&CM products were obtained from the relevant regulatory authority's websites for selected countries and regions (Macau-China, Hong Kong-China, Singapore, Australia, Canada, the European countries and the US). The market entry requirements in terms of quality, safety and efficacy of T&CM products for each country were analyzed and compared. Major differences were identified in the classification of T&CM products, market entry pathways, requirements of compliance with Good Manufacturing Practices; and level of evidence to demonstrate safety and efficacy based on historical use, non-clinical and clinical studies. Variations in the evaluation standards adopted by regulatory authorities pose a number of barriers and opportunities for the internationalization of T&CM products and have great implications for internationalization of TCMs from the sponsors' and the regulators' perspectives.
Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease(NAFLD), which is characterized by excessive fat accumulation in the liver of patients who consume little or no alcohol, becomes increasingly common with rapid ...economic development. Long-term excess fat accumulation leads to NAFLD and represents a global health problem with no effective therapeutic approach. NAFLD is considered to be a series of complex, multifaceted pathological processes involving oxidative stress, inflammation, apoptosis, and metabolism. Over the past decades, herbal medicines have garnered growing attention as potential therapeutic agents to prevent and treat NAFLD, due to their high efficacy and low risk of side effects. In this review, we evaluate the use of herbal medicines(including traditional Chinese herbal formulas, crude extracts from medicinal plants, and pure natural products) to treat NAFLD. These herbal medicines are natural resources that can inform innovative drug research and the development of treatments for NAFLD in the future.
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A long history of use and extensive documentation of the clinical practices of traditional Chinese medicine resulted in a considerable number of classical preparations, which are ...still widely used. This heritage of our ancestors provides a unique resource for drug discovery. Already, a number of important drugs have been developed from traditional medicines, which in fact form the core of Western pharmacotherapy. Therefore, this article discusses the differences in drug development between traditional medicine and Western medicine. Moreover, the article uses the discovery of artemisinin as an example that illustrates the “bedside–bench–bedside” approach to drug discovery to explain that the middle way for drug development is to take advantage of the best features of these two distinct systems and compensate for certain weaknesses in each. This article also summarizes evidence-based traditional medicines and discusses quality control and quality assessment, the crucial steps in botanical drug development. Herbgenomics may provide effective tools to clarify the molecular mechanism of traditional medicines in the botanical drug development. The totality-of-the-evidence approach used by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for botanical products provides the directions on how to perform quality control from the field throughout the entire production process.
The phenomenal growth of global pharmaceutical sales and the quest for innovation are driving an unprecedented search for human test subjects, particularly in middle- and low-income countries. Our ...hope for medical progress increasingly depends on the willingness of the world's poor to participate in clinical drug trials. While these experiments often provide those in need with vital and previously unattainable medical resources, the outsourcing and offshoring of trials also create new problems. In this groundbreaking book, anthropologist Adriana Petryna takes us deep into the clinical trials industry as it brings together players separated by vast economic and cultural differences. Moving between corporate and scientific offices in the United States and research and public health sites in Poland and Brazil,When Experiments Traveldocuments the complex ways that commercial medical science, with all its benefits and risks, is being integrated into local health systems and emerging drug markets.
Providing a unique perspective on globalized clinical trials,When Experiments Travelraises central questions: Are such trials exploitative or are they social goods? How are experiments controlled and how is drug safety ensured? And do these experiments help or harm public health in the countries where they are conducted? Empirically rich and theoretically innovative, the book shows that neither the language of coercion nor that of rational choice fully captures the range of situations and value systems at work in medical experiments today.When Experiments Travelchallenges conventional understandings of the ethics and politics of transnational science and changes the way we think about global medicine and the new infrastructures of our lives.
Traditional Chinese medicine-based herbal medicines have gained increasing acceptance worldwide in recent years and are being pursued by pharmaceutical companies as rich resources for drug discovery. ...For many years, traditional Chinese medicines (TCM) have been applied for the treatment of cancers in China and beyond. Herbal medicines are generally low in cost, plentiful, and show very little toxicity or side effects in clinical practice. However, despite the vast interest and ever-increasing demand, the absence of strong evidence-based research and the lack of standardization of the herbal products are the main obstacles toward the globalization of TCM. In recent years, TCM research has greatly accelerated with the advancement of analytical technologies and methodologies. This review of TCM specifically used in the treatment of cancer is divided into two parts. Part one provides an overview of the philosophy, approaches and progress in TCM-based cancer therapy. Part two summarizes the current understanding of how TCM-derived compounds function as anticancer drugs.
As an important source for traditional medical systems such as Ayurvedic medicine and traditional Chinese medicine, herbal medicines have received widespread attentions from all over the world, ...especially in developing countries. Over the past decade, studies on gut microbiota have generated rich information for understanding how gut microbiota shape the functioning of our body system. In view of the importance of gut microbiota, the researchers engaged in studying herbal medicines have paid more and more attention to gut microbiota and gut microbiota metabolites. Among a variety of gut microbiota metabolites, short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) have received most attention because of their important role in maintaining the hemostasis of hosts and recovery of diseases. Herbal medicines, as an important resource provider for production of SCFAs, have been demonstrated to be able to modulate gut microbiota composition and regulate SCFAs production. In this mini-review, we summarize current knowledge about SCFAs origination, the role of SCFAs in health and disease, the influence of herbal medicine on SCFAs production and the corresponding mechanisms. At the end of this review, the strategies and suggestions for further research of SCFAs and herbal medicines are also discussed.
Osteoporosis is a systemic metabolic bone disease characterized by a reduction in bone mass, bone quality, and microarchitectural deterioration. An imbalance in bone remodeling that is caused by more ...osteoclast-mediated bone resorption than osteoblast-mediated bone formation results in such pathologic bone disorder. Traditional Chinese medicines (TCM) have long been used to prevent and treat osteoporosis and have received extensive attentions and researches at home and abroad, because they have fewer adverse reactions and are more suitable for long-term use compared with chemically synthesized medicines. Here, we put the emphasis on osteoblasts, summarized the detailed research progress on the active compounds derived from TCM with potential anti-osteoporosis effects and their molecular mechanisms on promoting osteoblast-mediated bone formation. It could be concluded that TCM with kidney-tonifying, spleen-tonifying, and stasis-removing effects all have the potential effects on treating osteoporosis. The active ingredients derived from TCM that possess effects on promoting osteoblasts proliferation and differentiation include flavonoids, glycosides, coumarins, terpenoids (sesquiterpenoids, monoterpenoids, diterpenoids), phenolic acids, phenols and others (tetrameric stilbene, anthraquinones, diarylheptanoids). And it was confirmed that the bone formation effect induced by the above natural products was regulated by the expressions of bone specific matrix proteins (ALP, BSP, OCN, OPN, COL I), transcription factor (Runx2, Cbfa1, Osx), signal pathways (MAPK, BMP), local factors (ROS, NO), OPG/RANKL system of osteoblasts and estrogen-like biological activities. All the studies provided theoretical basis for clinical application, as well as new drug research and development on treating osteoporosis.
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