Native drugs of Vietnam: Which traditional and scientific approaches?
For thousands of years, our people treated diseases with herbs and plants which were gathered from gardens and forests. The recorded medical literature which now remains dates only after 10th century. In the history of Vietnamese national medicine, two names in particular stand out before 18th century. The first one is Tue Tinh of the 17th century, author of two treatises: Nam Duoc Than Hieu (The Miraculous Efficacy af Vietnamese Medicines) describing 580 indigenous drugs in 3873 prescriptions for 10 clinical specialities and Hong Nghia Giac Tu Thu. (Medical book from village Hong Nghia) summarizing the indications of 630 drugs with a theoretical part of traditional medicine. The second name would be Le Huu Trac (1720-1791) writing as Hai Thuong Lan Ong, author of the great treatise of traditional medicine with more than 30 volumes. From generation to generation by oral tradition and through literature, people have collected a lot of medicinal plants and especially a lot of medicinal prescriptions based on a long empirical knowledge of medicinal and toxic plants. After the August Revolution (1945), traditional medicine in our country was rehabilitated to its state position. Prof. Dr Do Tat Loi, one of the authors of this paper, was busy over 40 years compiling the medicinal plants, animal and mineral origins into a book (more than 1200 pages): Medicinal Plants and Drugs from Vietnam. A general part, the theoretical bases of eastern medicine, basic principles of drug identification, processing and preparation, study of drug efficaciousness and particular guides for using traditional drugs are presented. In the second part, the author introduces more than 700 drugs common in Vietnam. The medicinal plants and medicines are presented according to their therapeutic action. From our views, we get to know the following problems: (1) Traditional medicinal plants and medicines in Vietnam clearly have effectiveness for treatment of diseases on the basis of eastern philosophy and are asymptotic to nature but it is difficult for scientists to accept. From this point there exist two attitudes: (a) At first, traditional medicine must be studied with the help of modern methods and then can be applied to practice. (b) Our point of view is continuing to study and apply traditional medicine spontaneously. Which kind of attitude is right? (2) Traditional medicine should be introduced to people in general and especially for studuents and young scientists. We discuss with them, analyse and criticize and given them all our arguments on Eastern medicine. From there may be appear new ideas, new method for research. (3) Traditional medicine used in two cases: (a) Western medicine is ineffective. (b) Modern drugs are expensive so that poor people can't buy, these problems are very common in the developing countries. (4) We found that some plants, minerals etc. are used in traditional medicine and in modern medicine, but it does not mean that we do not need to continue to study.
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