Chinese Medicine Offers New Parkinson's Treatments

May all the altmed is trash posters please pile on.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20584-chinese-medicine-offers-new-parkinsons-treatments.html
A hooked herb, root extract and a dash of bark – it may sound like a witches' brew, but these compounds could provide treatments for diseases that have so far foiled western doctors, such as Parkinson's and irritable bowel syndrome.

For over 2000 years Chinese doctors have treated "the shakes" – now known as Parkinson's disease – with gou teng, a herb with hook-like branches.

Early this year, 115 people with Parkinson's were given a combination of traditional Chinese medical herbs, including gou teng, or a placebo for 13 weeks. At the end of the study, volunteers who had taken the herbs slept better and had more fluent speech than those taking the placebo.

Gou teng appears to stabilise symptoms, says Li Min, a traditional Chinese doctor at Hong Kong Baptist University. Now, Li and her colleagues have figured out how it might work.

My mom died of an aggressive form of Parkinson's Disease. Conventional medications made her hallucinate and did nothing for her "shakes"...she eventually had brain surgery to control that, but it really was too late by then.

Parkinson's is such a cruel and devastating illness. If herbs help, so be it.

and then we're cooking.

Who knows? But until they do, this is just more alt medicine nonsense.

I'm open to trying anything that actually works, so let's hope they release the study and then if found to be plausible, the results can be reproduced, time and time again.


Thats how science works. Do you agree?