by Eric Brand

Herbal pharmacy has long been an interest of mine. During my initial study of Chinese medicine at an acupuncture school in California, I spent three years filling formulas at a Chinatown-style herbal pharmacy. The boss was like a grandfather to me. He was my first close teacher outside of school, and I learned a lot about herbal quality discernment during our time together. His shop filled formulas for many of San Diego’s top Chinese medical practitioners, which really helped me to see the combinations of medicinals and dosage trends in action. Beyond the medicine itself, the experience was great for my Chinese language development as well as my understanding of Chinese culture.

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Even since those early days in the pharmacy, I’ve had tremendous enthusiasm for the subject of herbal pharmacy. Pharmacy is a specialized field in the Chinese world, but there are hardly any resources for studying herbal pharmacy in the English language. The behind-the-scenes elements of quality discernment, authentication, and pao zhi (processing) are essential to our clinical success when prescribing Chinese medicinals, but the lack of good English resources causes the discipline of pharmacy to be relatively underdeveloped in the Western world. For example, English doesn’t have any established specialized vocabulary to talk about all the special terms that come up for something like ginseng quality discernment, so it can only really be studied in Chinese and the source texts are very difficult to translate.

I've always loved checking out herb markets, and by this point I've managed to make it to most of China's largest and most important herbal centers. Over time, it seems that my connections have become more and more developed in the world of pharmacy, and lately it seems that I spend a lot of time studying issues of herbal authentication and quality discernment. By some stroke of good fortune, I seem to be surrounded by herbal experts- my teachers Dr. Zhao Zhong-Zhen in Hong Kong and Dr. Chang Hsien-Cheh in Taiwan are among the top people in the world for traditional quality discernment. On top of this, I am fortunate to be in contact with Roy Upton, perhaps America’s leading pioneer of herbal medicine authentication.

By happy coincidence, these three teachers form a perfect triangle of contacts for my academic interests. Roy Upton is the founder of the American Herbal Pharmacopoeia project, and his group provides authenticated reference samples for the herbal industry in the U.S. Roy is very knowledgeable about issues of Western herbal medicine that my Asian teachers are interested in, as well as material that will be very useful for my upcoming PhD research. Conveniently, my teachers in Asia are also the perfect contacts to help with Roy’s authentication work. As the young, enthusiastic bilingual student in the middle, I get to learn from all of them and I soak it up like a sponge.

Recently, I’ve had the chance to become involved in more and more herbal authentication and quality discernment projects. For example, I helped acquire a number of reference samples of Chinese medicinals for Roy Upton’s American Herbal Pharmacopoeia project. I went to a great herb shop in Taiwan, selected high-quality specimens of 60 or so herbs, and then brought them to my teacher for authentication. It was a lot of fun because the guys in the herb shop were stunned to see a white boy asking questions in Chinese about the various grades and botanical variants, and then my teacher Dr. Chang spent an entire afternoon going through each sample, teaching me all the details about each specimen. Those authenticated specimens then go on to become reference standards for the herbal industry in the U.S., so manufacturers and researchers can use these authenticated samples for microscopy, HPLC assessment, organoleptic assessment, TLC, etc.

The next step on the authentication front is my upcoming visit to Blue Poppy’s manufacturing facility in China. We have a team of pharmacy experts on staff at the facility already, but nonetheless I will be able to personally assess the quality and dig through the thousands of kilos of raw herbs that we will be using on our next manufacturing run. Over the next week or so, I will be writing blogs and uploading photos and videos so that Blue Poppy customers can see the rigor that goes into our manufacturing and raw herb selection process.

Starting later this week, I will be watching twigs and roots go from the traditional quality selection and pao zhi stages through all the stages of extraction and HPLC constituent analysis…nerd heaven! I love Blue Poppy. It is really an honor to work with a company that has the integrity and transparency of Blue Poppy, and I can’t wait to try the finished products.