Chinese medicine is a precious treasure inherited from ancient ancestors. It is accredited for the prosperous growth of the Chinese nations. However, the descriptions of the herbs in the ancient herbal are not in detail and the great numbers of
herbs
used which grows in the wide geographic areas together with various local folk names, new substitutes and new folk medicines had increased, many Chinese herbs are composed of herbs that are labeled with identical names but sctually are of
different
origins and different grades. Similar situation had occurred in China, Japan and Korea.
In Taiwan, misused Chinese crude drugs are also very common in the past. This phenomenon had caused alt of confusion and had great influence the clinical efficacy of the treatment. In the past, Professor Hong Yen Hsu, Na Chi, Woei Song Kan and
Kung
Yin
Yen had studied the origins of Chinese crude drugs in Taiwan based on the morphological identification and found that the origins of Ma-Tou-Ling, Pu-Kung-Yin, Tu-Chung, Wang-Pu-Liu-Hisng, Pan-Lan-Ken, Niu-Chi, Fang-Chi, Huang-Chi, Pien-Hsiu and
Sha
Wan-Tziare different from that of the species used in mainland China.
In order to assure the quality and clinical efficacy of the crude drugs, besides the traditional morphological methods, we bad recently combined modern chemical and pharma-cological methods to assess drug quality. Drugs that have been evaluated
without
effects should beabandoned. The species of those commonly misued crude drugs used in compound formula preparations are also identified Based on the pharmacological results, a suitable species is recommended so as to improve the clinical efficacy
of
those preparations.
In this paper, we like to report our recent studies on Niu Chi(Achyranthis Bidentatae Radix, Cyathulae Radix and Strobilanthis Radix). Fang-Chi(Arstologhiae Fangchi Radix, Stephaniae Tetrandrae Radix and Cocculus Radix) and Huang-Chi(Astragali
Radix
andHedysari Radix) using comparative pharmacognosy methods.
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