ABSTRACT
The use of herbs to treat various human diseases has been recorded for thousands of years. In Asia's current medical system, numerous herbal formulas have been repeatedly verified to confirm their effectiveness in different periods, which is a great resource for drug innovation and discovery. Through the mining of these clinical effective formulas by network pharmacology and bioinformatics analysis, important biologically active ingredients derived from these natural products might be discovered. As modern medicine requires a combination of multiple drugs for the treatment of complex diseases, previously clinical formulas are also combinations of various herbs according to the main causes and accompanying symptoms. However, the herbs that play a major role in the treatment of diseases are always unclear. Therefore, how to rank each herb's relative importance and determine the core herbs, is the first step to assisting herb selection for active ingredients discovery. To solve this problem, we built the platform FangNet, which ranks all herbs on their relative topological importance using the PageRank algorithm, based on the constructed symptom-herb network from a collection of clinical empirical prescriptions. Three types of herb hidden knowledge, including herb importance rank, herb-herb co-occurrence, and associations to symptoms, were provided in an interactive visualization. Moreover, FangNet has designed role-based permission for teams to store, analyze, and jointly interpret their clinical formulas, in an easy and secure collaboration environment, aiming at creating a central hub for massive symptom-herb connections. FangNet can be accessed at http://fangnet.org or http://fangnet.herb.ac.cn.
ABSTRACT
The modern medicine in Japan made a remarkable progress according to development of Western medicine and further studies made it possible to understand almost of all diseases as cell and gene abnormalities using scientific approach such as imaging diagnosis or blood biochemistry. Kampo medicine, on the other hand, developed especially in Japan and is defined as holistic medicine because many diseases can be induced by responses of whole body against various causes instead of cell or organ abnormalities.<br>Recently EBM (Evidence based medicine) is required in the clinical field.<br>Though the evidence cannot be obtained easily in the clinical field, the concept of EBM seems to be important in achieving clinical practice even from the stand view point of cost-benefit and many trials began to accept this EBM in the field of Western medicine.<br>On the other hand, usefulness of Kampo medicine on various diseases was elucidated by means of Western analysis such as double blind test and the “Shou”, unique diagnostic method for Kampo medicine, turned out not to be necessary in all cases for the best treatment. Doctors engaging in Kampo medicine began to change their attitude to accept EBM by their newly considered method including conventional “Shou”<br>Both medicines, Western and Kampo medicine, have various features and merits or demerits for the treatment of diseases respectively. Therefore, a trial to combine Kampo and Western medicine should be taken into consideration, to improve the clinical practice.
ABSTRACT
The first Japan-Korea workshop on acupuncture and EBM was held on June 4, 2004 at Chiba in the 53rd annual scientific meeting of the JSAM. The purpose of this workshop was to exchange the experiences of clinical researches on acupuncture and moxibustion therapies, and to find out the issues and their solutions for developing the excellent clinical research to establish strong evidence. The final purpose was to develop aprotocol for the collaborative work between both countries.<BR>Drs. Kawakita (JSAM) and Jang (KAMS) chaired the workshop. Three speakers from Japan (Drs Takahashi, Nabeta, and Tsukayama) and three Korean speakers (Drs Seo, Lee and Moon) presented their data on the clinical researches of acupuncture, moxibustion and bee-venom injection. After their paper presentations, various issues were discussed on their research methodology for establishing more strong evidence of acupuncture.We got interesting new findings and understood various issues for conducting clinical researches especially RCT.<BR>Although we could not develop a protocol for the collaborative research in this workshop, it was very fruitful workshop as the first step for the future Japan-Korea collaborative clinical study. The most important product of this workshop was we could understand each other and we confirmed the necessity of the future collaborative clinical research on acupuncture.