By Eric Brand

A few months ago, I found myself in a trade show next to the Yin Care booth. I’d prescribed Yin Care before for patients and I’ve used the original product that inspired it in China, but I had no idea that I would someday find the stuff habit-forming. Daniel, one of the friendly faces behind the operation, innocently gave me a sample of the mouthwash and now that I’ve finished the bottle I can’t go without it.

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By Eric Brand

I recently found yet another treasure trove of online resources for Chinese medicine research. I discovered this batch because I was originally looking at some photos of authenticated medicinals in the online specimen database of Hong Kong Baptist University, which is basically a collection of images from my teacher Dr. Zhao Zhongzhen's herbal museum in Hong Kong. The specimen database is a great find on its own, but I also just discovered that HKBU's library system has some phenomenal links to a mind-blowing range of articles. For example, this link to Pubmed contains a huge repository of articles from 2006-2010, and most of the articles have free links to the full text version. Clicking here will take you to a section of HKBU's online library that contains links to a great list of open access online journal articles related to Chinese medicine.

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By Eric Brand

Today I was alerted to this link about the New England School of Acupuncture, check it out! Apparently NESA just received a $1.2 million dollar grant from the U.S. Department of Defense to research the efficacy of acupuncture treatment for patients suffering from Gulf War Illness. According to the article, more than 100,000 Gulf War veterans suffer from complex, multi-symptom illnesses that persist for years. In their research study, NESA will be treating 120 veterans with Gulf War Illness to test the efficacy of acupuncture in such patients.

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By Eric Brand

Today was the day that my granule book was officially supposed to arrive at our warehouse. My ears perked up every time a delivery truck pulled in, but alas the shipping truck is a bit on the slow side and the book won't be in until Tuesday, July 6th. This means that there is one more weekend left to get the 20% discount for the pre-publication special. Here is the link

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By Eric Brand

In previous blogs, we have often mentioned the topic of cGMP (current Good Manufacturing Practices) regulations and Chinese herbal dispensaries. Despite the fact that cGMP regulations technically classify all compounding pharmacies as “manufacturers,” the majority of practitioners in our field enjoy what the FDA calls “discretionary enforcement” because they prescribe herbs to patients on a one-to-one basis. This means that most practitioners probably have little need to worry about any legal problems regarding their herbal dispensary as long as nothing goes terribly wrong.

As individual practitioners, we generally don’t have the ability to achieve true GMP compliance so we just keep our fingers crossed, try to maintain a clean space and good records, and hope that we don’t make any major mistakes. For most of us, the cost of maintaining a GMP-compliant space outweighs the risk of operating in the gray area of enforcement discretion. But what does a cGMP-compliant dispensing pharmacy really look like in real life?

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