Comparative Studies of Medicinal Herbs listed in Pharmacopoeia in the East Asia

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1) Object: Traditional Chinese Medicine has been spread widely in East Asia region such as Japan and Korea, and still used there at present. But some of herbal medicines have been changed in their names, their origins, and/or clinical purposes, and/or replaced with another origin by different conditions in each country as its climate, social traits, culture, kind of diseases, and anthropological factors. And there are complicated circumstances behind the matter of herbal medicines among these nations. This project was designed to specify names of medicinal herbs of each country based on its official book and to find out what the original of its official book was, and intend to harmonize the complicated circumstances.2) Methods: In order to investigate this matter systematically, a database was built for the herbal medicines listed in the official books ; Japan Pharmacopoeia 14th revision and Japan Herbal Medicine Codex (190 herbs), Pharmacopoeia of the People's Republic of China (504 h … More erbs), and The Korea Pharmacopoeia (136 herbs). The data were compared and analyzed on the names, Chinese characters, the origins, the parts used as medicine, and their processing.3) Results: Comparing terms of medicinal herbs, we classified the factors which brought the differences among nations into several categories as follows ; (A-l) Same/similar name, same origin, (A-2) Same name, different origin, (A-3) Different name, same origin, (A-4) Different name but the usage is same, different origin, (A-5) complicated nomenclature, and (A-6) others. Additionally, there were some differences in the portions (the whole bodies, fruits, leaves, skins, roots, etc.), and their processing (dried, steam dried, etc.). Category A-5 has 24 groups.4) Conclusion: The current condition should be grasped through the combination of the categories as above. Such confusion may prevent progress in the evaluation of traditional Chinese medicine including Kampo medicine. In order to achieve our goal, to promote intercommunication for better understanding among researchers, standardization and/or harmonization of terminology is required. Less