DIABETES TREATMENT W/CHINESE HERBS #2

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

by Subhuti Dharmananda, Ph.D., Director, Institute for Traditional Medicine, Portland, Oregon

By the latter half of the 20th century, there were about 200 standard prescriptions recorded as suitable for treating diabetes (6). The majority of these may be described as combinations selected from about two dozen main anti-diabetic ingredients to be described in this article plus a small number of auxiliary herbs with complementary properties or aimed at treating a specific manifestation of the disease.

In China, diabetes is not as prevalent as elsewhere. The incidence rate is reported to be 0.67% (7), compared to about 2.2% (8) in the U.S. (90% of the U.S. cases are insulin-independent type). This difference may be due to a combination of genetic factors (diabetes runs in families, so has a genetic component), obesity frequency and severity (modern China has far less problem with obesity than the U.S.), and specific dietary components (milk, which is rarely used in China, may be implicated in some instances of insulin-dependent diabetes and nitrosamine-preserved foods may also be sensitizing to this disease (9); herbs used in Oriental food therapy, such as the Chinese yam, bitter melon, and ginseng tea, reduce blood sugar (10)). World-wide estimates of diabetes incidence are on the order of 1.0%, placing China among the group of nations with low incidence and the U.S. in the high incidence category.

The disease etiology-according to traditional ideas-is described this way in modern China (7): "Diabetes mellitus originates from deficiency of yin and is manifested externally as a syndrome of excessive heat. With progress of the disease, deficiency of yin produces dry-heat which in turn damages qi and yin, leading to deficiency of both yin and yang." In light of this explanation, researchers examining 60 diabetes patients, mostly with insulin-independent type diabetes, found that the first stage of disease (with yin deficiency and excess heat) developed over a period of about 3 years, the intermediate stage (with deficiency of qi and yin) developed over a period of about 5 years, and the late stage (with deficiency of qi, yin, and yang) developed over a period of about 8 years. Disorders of blood circulation also progressed over time. Early-onset insulin-dependent diabetes progresses very rapidly to the third stage in most individuals.

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