Raw Materials
There are roughly 13,000 medicinals used in China and over 100,000 medicinal recipes recorded in the ancient literature. Plant elements and extracts are by far the most common elements used. In the classic Handbook of Traditional Drugs from 1941, 517 drugs were listed - out of these, only 45 were animal parts, and 30 were minerals. For many plants used as medicinals, detailed instructions have been handed down not only regarding the locations and areas where they grow best, but also regarding the best timing of planting and harvesting them.
Some animal parts used as medicinals can be considered rather strange such as cows' gallstones. In general, Chinese traditional medicine emphasizes the penis of animals as therapeutic. Snake oil, which is used traditionally for joint pain as a liniment was extensively marketed in the West in the late 1800s and early 1900s and wildly claimed to be effective in treating many maladies; however, there is no clinical evidence that it is effective.
Traditional Chinese Medicine also includes some human parts: the classic Materia medica (Bencao Gangmu) describes the use of 35 human body parts and excreta in medicines, including bones, fingernail, hairs, dandruff, earwax, impurities on the teeth, feces, urine, sweat, and organs, but most are no longer in use.
Read more about this topic: Chinese Herbology
Famous quotes related to raw materials:
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, ‘memoirs to serve for a history,’ which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)