History of Medicine

Turmeric is a very popular spice used in Indian cooking- it is what gives curry its distinctive yellow color. The yellow color can also cause staining in clothes that is practically impossible to get rid of! Turmeric is also one of the oldest medicinal herbs and extensively used in Ayurvedic medicine. It is well known in India for its antiseptic and anti-inflammatory effects. Commonly referred to as the Golden Spice, turmeric (or haldi in India) is said to have many medicinal properties including strengthening energy and improving blood circulation, and is used to treat a variety of ailments like asthma, bronchitis, arthritis, sprains, and swelling. In fact, whenever I suffered a minor injury, the first thing my mom applied on my wound was a paste made from turmeric (which is found in every Indian kitchen even in America, and used in almost every traditional Indian dish). I grew up rolling my eyes at one of the most common household remedies for most Indians.🙄 Turmeric, also known as

Ancient and modern medicine differ primarily in their approach to finding a cure- the former relied on experience and accumulated knowledge (tried and true method, if you will), whereas modern medicine uses chemistry and research to determine the therapeutic potential of a drug. As a result, the two are often distinguished as Experience vs. Evidence-based medicine. Another important difference between ancient and modern medicine is that modern medicine uses targeted treatment of the specific illness whereas ancient medicine relied on holistic healing.  Experience Vs. Evidence- Based Medicine While both are on opposite sides of the medical spectrum with modern medicine seeming far more logical and therefore reliable, modern medicine still lacks cures for many diseases that traditional medicines seemed to have a remedy for, including common ailments like the cold and stomach issues.  In fact, after years of dismissing ancient (mainly traditional eastern) medical practices as non-scientif

If ancient Chinese medicine can give us a cure for malaria, could it also provide cures for other diseases like cancer? That was my thought when I first read about the discovery of the malaria remedy in TCM, and apparently, I wasn't the first to think that! A pharmacology professor at Yale University is trying to find out exactly that. Prof. Yung-Chi Cheng of the Yale School of Medicine is studying botanical drugs based on Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) that can make traditional cancer treatments work better. The professor calls the approach "WE medicine"- a combination of Western experimental-based pharmacology and eastern experience plant-based medicine.  I found the story of how his research began also quite interesting. After he expressed his interest in Chinese medicine for cancer treatment to a postdoc researcher, Shwu-Huey Liu, she went to the library and started researching Chinese herbs. After narrowing the search to common herbs that are still in use, and ha