By Eric Brand

Chinese medicine has a long history of maintaining secrecy around prized formulas and techniques. In the old lineage model of instruction, students spent years forming relationships with their teachers and the teachers would reserve their best knowledge for the closest students. To this day, families of pharmacists and doctors often pass down formulas and techniques that have been closely guarded for generations. This legacy is somewhat at odds with the modern Western cultural style, which generally favors open sharing of information and pooling of knowledge. What are the roots of this history of secrecy, and what is its value in the modern day?

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I’ve experienced a broad spectrum of perspectives from my teachers on the secret formula issue. One of my first teachers was an old Chinese herbalist named Guo Nan-Yu who was trained by his grandfather while growing up in Vietnam; he had dozens of little handwritten books of formulas that had been passed down for generations, and he had a number of prized formulas that he called “special formulas” or “secret formulas.” These formulas were never shared with others, and the identity of the herbs was often concealed by grinding the herbs so that other herbalists couldn’t break down the prescription.

Guo emphasized that these special formulas were remarkably effective treasures that should be respected by secrecy; indeed, they were the key to his livelihood. He regarded the special formulas as time-tested, perfected entities that had better clinical effects than purely theory-based standard textbook formulas. As he explained it, patients with a given problem would come in to the pharmacy and they would be given a prescription. They would then come back and report on their good effects and side effects. If they had side effects or lack of good effects, the formula would be adjusted. Once a formula seemed to make most people better and didn’t give most people side effects, it would become a special formula that could be dispensed for people with that condition. These balanced formulas were passed down for generations within the family, and these “generation formulas” were his preference whenever he had patients that suffered from problems that his special formulas could treat.

Medicine has doubled as both a benevolent pursuit and a livelihood that must make ends meet for millennia. Being the best herbalist in the area for a given condition brings patients and income, and historically there were no patents or other means of protecting intellectual property besides secrecy. When herbalists stumbled upon remarkably effective formulas, the only way to maintain their competitive advantage was to keep the ingredient list secret from other local herbalists.

In many ways, herbal medicine is like cooking. Cooking involves a complex blend of ingredients and perfect balance for a special flavor. Many classic dishes are found in published recipe books but other dishes have secret preparations that are guarded in a family or a restaurant, giving the cook a niche that is difficult to duplicate. For every book that has been published in the history of Chinese medicine, there have been countless people from small family lineages like Guo who have collected their own books of unpublished prized formulas. Guo is not separated from this ancient tradition and to him this lineage-style secret formula tradition is the essence of Chinese medicine.

By contrast, my teacher Feng Ye in Taiwan eschewed the notion of secret formulas. To him, strong mastery of the literature, clear pattern diagnosis, and dynamic adjustments to a custom formula forms the essence of Chinese medicine. He regarded reliance on secret formulas as lazy, something that appealed to a busy practitioner looking for a convenient solution rather than the epitome of clinical efficacy. In his view, the superior practitioner is one who can diagnose accurately and match this diagnosis to customized therapy that can surpass any “special” formula. This perspective suggests that there is no secret formula that is better than a well-crafted customized formula based on traditional theory and pattern differentiation.

Both perspectives have a long history that is alive and well in Chinese medicine today. We find that the issue of complete disclosure versus proprietary knowledge still plays out in the herbal marketplace. U.S. law allows products to be sold with “proprietary blends,” and many TCM companies in America are reluctant to disclose the proportions of their ingredients. The law does require disclosure of ingredients (but not quantities) for dietary supplements, but a number of “patent medicines” from China simply evade the problem by incomplete or inaccurate labeling.

Maintaining secrecy has long been the norm for companies trying to keep a competitive edge. For example, the seasonings used to create the flavor of Coca-Cola or KFC are major trade secrets that are completely unpublished, and a similar situation exists for Chinese herbal products like Yunnan Baiyao. Many of these products have been privately researched with chemical analysis, but few of them have been definitively cracked and published.

At the end of the day, I tend to resonate with Feng Ye’s opinion that no formula is more special than the one that is custom-made for a particular patient by a well-educated doctor. Yet at the same time, the tonic wine I drink comes from one of Guo’s secret formulas, and I’ve only ever found one other that could ever compare to it (the other was also a secret, but from a friend’s teacher). It really is special, very balanced and delicious.

In our line of work, we are constantly put in a position of trust. Regardless of whether you learn a secret from the trust of a patient or the trust of a teacher, the respectful thing to do is to preserve the spirit of confidentiality that allowed them to open up to you in the first place. If your teacher felt it was secret and they entrusted you with it, don’t put the master’s secret martial arts liniment on your facebook page. They would rather that you save it for when you are old and have a student worth teaching it to one-on-one. That said, we wouldn’t have the medicine we have today if people like Zhang Zhongjing didn’t write stuff down for posterity, so don’t bring all your goods to the grave.