Although dismissed by drug based medicine, Chinese medicine continues to find a growing body of users because it often offers a safe and effective alternative to drugs.

One of the continuing problems for practitioners of drug based Western medicine is the colorful and often mysterious language used to describe Chinese medicine, which includes thousands of chemical compounds.

In a unique study, researchers have analyzed over 8,000 chemical compounds found in about 240 herbs used in Chinese medicine. With this decomposition of compounds, researchers can better translate the herbal formulas found in Chinese medicine into more familiar Western terms.
The study will be published in the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling.

Chinese medicine, one of the oldest and widely used systems of medicine with centuries of stored and evaluated knowledge, is a complete medical system for diagnosis and treatment. The new research can help make this knowledge more available to Western scientists and researches to understand tap into this highly developed medicine.

Source
Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling