In September 2016, Complemedis organised a trip to the province of Jilin, which forms the largest part of the border with North Korea. We travelled along the border river to this hermetically sealed country and visited ginseng plantations and factories on the Chinese side that deal with its processing. Our travel group was made up of TCM doctors, TCM therapists from Switzerland, members and co-organisers of our main supplier of granules from Taiwan, people from its branch in California and, finally, the two scientists Prof. Michael Heinrich and PhD Anthony Booker, who teach at English universities. The latter two are the authors of the paper below, which we would like to present to a wider audience.
A ginkgo tree bears many leaves and you might think it would be easy to extract them and hardly worth wasting a thought on how to get even easier access to this raw material for medicines that seem to have a certain effect on dementia. But wrong thinking! As the following article shows, there seems to be no limit to the tricks that certain manufacturers use to make production even easier and cheaper. There is shameless adulteration and cheating and it cannot be warned enough not to obtain such medicines from uncontrolled sources. The work of Booker, Heinrich et al. opens our eyes to this problem and provides an interesting insight into the detailed criminalistic work of well-funded laboratories. The authors have specialised in the field of so-called 'value chains', i.e. they try to trace the path of a TCM plant from its location/cultivation to the end product and want to show what pitfalls lurk along the way and how those involved and ultimately the consumers can sharpen their awareness of the quality of TCM remedies. We thank them for this.
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