GETTYSBURG MEDICAL NEWS
The Clinical View
By P. E. Hoffsten, M.D.
14 May 2008

CHINESE HERB KIDNEY DISEASE

            There are certain catch words in our jargon that are just about guaranteed to sell a product.  Among these are “natural,” “organically grown,” “herbal,” and “new.”  If you put the words foreign, European, Oriental, Chinese, or Far Eastern in front of those first words your product will sell even better.  Finally, if you put the word weight loss on the product, there is no way it can fail.  Thus was born “Dr. Wu’s Chinese Herbal Weight Loss Pill.”  I was first asked about these in 1992 by (believe it or not) a doctor’s wife.  She had been given these pills by a friend in Rapid City who claimed that they worked wonderfully to help a person lose weight.  The pills were about the size of an Aspirin tablet, creamy white, with a somewhat hard coating on the outside like an M&M candy.  There was no marking on the pill at all and no information on the ingredients of the pill, its purity, or safety. 

            This doctor’s wife wanted to know what I knew about these pills and if they were safe and effective.  After I made some joking comment questioning her sanity, she took offense and said she was serious.  She said she tried everything to lose weight and this was her last hope.  In 1992 I didn’t know a thing about these pills and had never heard of them.  I told this doctor’s wife that it would be an extremely unwise choice to be the guinea pig trying them out no matter how hard she tried to lose weight.  As you might imagine, I never really knew what she did with these pills, but over the next several years, I didn’t notice that she had lost any weight either.

            It is now 16 years later and recent review in one of my medical journals has finally enlightened me about Dr. Wu’s Chinese Herbal Weight Loss Pill.  They are supposed to contain a chemical called tetrandrine, which is a form of “speed” that happens to grow in the Chinese herb from which these pills are supposedly made.  The biologic name of the Chinese herb is Aristolochia fangji which yields the drug tetrandrine used in China for various purposes.  Unfortunately, there is another Chinese herb called Aristolochia fangchi.  The two words for these Chinese herbs are pronounced almost exactly the same and they are easily confused as to which one a person is talking about when the spoken word is used.  The second word aristolochia fangchi has a very toxic substance in it called aristolochic acid.  This toxic chemical substance will poison kidneys and lead to end-stage kidney failure requiring dialysis or transplant in people that use significant amounts of this Chinese herb.

            As you might imagine, not all people who make pills are equally skilled.  If somebody confused the biologic names for the herbs described above, it wouldn’t be very hard to make the mistake of substituting one for the other and that is exactly what has happened on several occasions.  When the mistake is made and the wrong herb is substituted in the pill, those who use it can develop kidney disease that changes their lives.  Perhaps, incidentally, kidney disease usually leads to significant weight loss so in that regard the pill does work but it is a harsh treatment.

            The message from this column relates to a growing problem world wide.  It seems that the basic biologic property of the human being is to use secret special products not recommended or prescribed by those pompous overeducated doctors and pharmacists.  It seems as if a friend or a relative or somebody at a party/bar whom you have never even met before tells you about a special secret pill it is much more convincing than any health care professional.  Most recent statistics indicate that 42 percent of the United States population uses so called complimentary or alternative medications.  These medications are not certified by composition, purity, effectiveness, or safety.  Yet 42 percent of our population uses them.  I look upon this as a horrible failing of the healthcare professionals in their ability to communicate information to the public.  Perhaps that is related to the public’s distrust of the “used car salesman” image of the pharmaceutical industry and the direct consumer advertising that is going on now.  But whatever the reason of the public’s need for alternative and complimentary medications, it is probably safer to recognize that the real “used car salesmen” are the ones selling products such as Dr. Wu’s Chinese Herbal Weight Loss Pill.  For that matter, watch out for any product that has those wonderful words mentioned above in the first paragraph.