Using Chinese medicine to understand medicinal herb quality: An alternative to biomedical approaches?

Craig Hassel, Christopher Hafner, Renne Soberg, Jeff Adelmann and Rose Haywood

Agriculture and Human Values, 2002, vol. 19, issue 4, 337-347

Abstract: Chinese medicine (CM) is one ofseveral ancient systems of medical care basedupon a different worldview than the prevailingbiomedical model; it employs its own language,systems of logic, and criteria forunderstanding health and diagnosing illness.Medicinal herbs play a central role in the CMsystem of practice and knowledgeable CMpractitioners have extensive clinicalexperience using them. However, the establishedscientific and regulatory organizations thatrely upon biomedical understandings ofpathology do not accept the definitions formedicinal herb quality used by CMpractitioners. Furthermore, local medicinalherb growers within the upper Midwest are in aposition to grow many herbs, but are unclearabout the demand for and desired qualities ofthe medicinal herbs they produce. Given thissituation, the Medicinal Herb Network wasfounded as a partnership effort of small-scalemedicinal herb growers and practitioners of CMto develop more appropriate standards ofmedicinal herb quality and to encourage locallygrown, high quality medicinal herbs consistentwith these standards. An overview of CM servesas grounding from which to articulate thedilemmas experienced by CM practitioners ofperceiving medicinal herb quality andintegrating knowledge across divergent medicalsystems. A Network initiative designed toovercome these dilemmas illustrates thepossibility of developing a lexicon of qualitydescriptors for medicinal herbs using Chinesemedical theory, while drawing from descriptivesensory analysis procedures currently practicedby a sub-group of food scientists. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2002

Keywords: Chinese medicine; Descriptive sensory analysis; Epistemology; Indigenous knowledge; Medicinal herb; Quality standards (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1023/A:1021144102102 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:agrhuv:v:19:y:2002:i:4:p:337-347

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10460

DOI: 10.1023/A:1021144102102

Access Statistics for this article

Agriculture and Human Values is currently edited by Harvey S. James Jr.

More articles in Agriculture and Human Values from Springer, The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().