We have been treating Chinese Medicine as dietary supplement. FDA regulates dietary supplements under a different set of regulations than those covering “conventional” foods and drug products. The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act defines a dietary ingredient as a vitamin; mineral; herb or other botanical; amino acid; dietary substance for use by man to supplement the diet by increasing the total dietary intake; or a concentrate, metabolite, constituent, extract, or combination of the preceding substances.
Chinese Medicine is nature edible which includes botanical, animal and minerals. Some of them are “conventional” foods in China. To tell the truth, food has more varieties in rest of world than in US supermarkets. In China, we have word called “Medicine and food are of the same source”. Our term of medicine is nature products which has function of making people healthy. Certainly it includes function of curing diseases. The theory behind Chinese Medicine is totally different from what the western medicine defines of treating diseases. Or “diseases” Chinese Medicine treats are “different” from diseases Western Medicine treats. When Western Medicine came into China hundreds years ago and became popular in the recent hundred year along the rise of western civilization, we started to correlate the disease treated in Chinese Medicine with the disease defined in Western Medicine and now Conventional Medicine. So now we talked about inflammation, or circulation to our patient, because this can make our patient understand.
Culture is changing as Chinese Medicine becomes popular. Vitamins were used to be equivalent to dietary supplement in people life. Vitamins, Antioxidants, amino acid, etc are man made substances. Chinese Medicine or herbs are not man made, it totally comes from nature and produced in mechanical means (cooking) as contrast to chemical means.
http://www.fda.gov/Food/DietarySupplements/ProductsIngredients/default.htm
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