Statistics shows that Americans spend more on alternative than on conventional treatments.

Statistics shows that 90% of Taiwanese cancer patients will choose alternative treatment in addition to conventional surgery and chemotherapy.

National Taiwan University Hospital Provides Inquiry for Herbal and Traditional Treatments.


(Dr. Dr. Jeng-Fong Chiou, M.D.)
One patient came for treatment, for example, for chemotherapy, you would find out that one chemotherapy would result in the decreasing of T-lymphocyte activity which might recover after resting. T-lymphocyte activity decrease lower after the second treatment and slowly recovered again. Obviously, it decreased even lower after the third treatment. Therefore, repeatedly undertaking chemotherapy would result in damaging on T-lymphocyte very badly. In fact, chemotherapy could treat cancer but could damage your immune system as well.


(Dr. Da-Fu Hsu)
Oncologists looked at bad cells instead of good cells. Destructive methods are mostly applied by oncologists. Chemotherapy, surgery and radiation therapy are destructive which cause damages to many patients.


(Dr. Andy Sun, Ph.D., D.D.S.)
One disadvantage of conventional cancer treatment is violently destructing cancer cells and normal cells. Strongly recommended to you is a way to kill cancer cells without harming normal cells.


(Dr Chi-Ming Lai, M.D.)
Cancer treatments among conventional medical field, in fact, are facing many inadequacies. We are in need of integration in many ways, which might be the greatest difficulty of all.

Complementary and alternative (CAM) is the forthcoming trend in cancer treatment and many developed countries have tried to catch up in addition to conventional methods, they hope to, find another way to have satisfactory cancer survival rate.


(Dr. Hiroyuki Abe)
Nowadays, conventional treatments can be said to have encountered the bottleneck. Utilizing the so called TCM or Traditional medicine with conventional medicines is the Integrative and complementary medicine.


(Professor Narin Voravud, M.D.)
Alternative Medicine is another branch of medicine that might complement or increase effectiveness of the treatment.


(Dr. Hiroyuki Abe)
Among CAM, TCM stands for an important role especially in the treatment of cancer. Recently, in Japan, among cancer treatments TCM is frequently applied.


(Professor Won-Bo Wang, Ph.D.)
Most Chinese herbal mixtures can increase immunity, or boost up patients’ energy, or may have some effects if such mixtures were used to complementarily treat cancer. It might have some help.


(Dr Chi-Ming Lai, M.D.)
Now, our lab analysis discovered many evidences, if herbal medicine was integrated to conventional medicine, in fact, efficacy could be increased. For example, increasing the effect of chemotherapy and radiation therapy, we gathered sufficient evidence from our lab analysis, because herbal medicine presents the effect of multiple molecular targeting, therefore, it has anti-cancer function when used together with radiation and chemotherapy. It might achieve and amplified effect, as a result, integration of herbal medicine and conventional treatment is a promising method in the future.


(Dr. Hiroyuki Abe)
Speaking of CAM in Japan and the integration of many treatments, TCM is the most common treatment in addition to conventional treatment.


(Professor Narin Voravud, M.D.)
In the year 2002, the ministry of health in Thailand has established a new department of complementary and alternative medicine as an alternative treatment for the patients, including the cancer patients.

The alternative Medicine has less cost and inexpensive and less side effects. The integration of the complementary and alternative medicine to the conventional medicine requires academic standardization and research to optimize such treatment with the current conventional medical treatment for cancer patients.

(Dr Chi-Ming Lai, M.D.)
CAM is originated from the US and has developed quickly. Americans are into the research of our ancestor’s invention, herbal medicine. Indeed, we started this research in a slower pace. Therefore, we hope to call upon that not only the request from patients and their family, but also the consideration from our government. I think, most importantly, medical professions could value CAM. I think to develop CAM, is to start from the search for the basic theory from the laboratory; animal experiment and clinical trial. Then, I can foresee, in the future, Cam can be vigorously developed in Taiwan.

Proving that whether herbal medicine has anti cancer effect can be applied through the latest multiple molecular targeting technical platform of which PPAR-gamma is able to identify whether this herbal medicine is capable of decreasing fat, blood sugar, inflammation, or anti cancer.


(Dr. Jeng-Fong Chiou, M.D.)
One meaningful index can be referred to prove your treatment on increasing your immunity. Such examining method for many treatments, including taking health products and Chinese herbal medicine, which might be an ideal model of beneficial treatment.


(Dr Jean-San Chia)
We know that the first step of developing a new drug is to start from the basic research at the laboratory.


(Dr Chi-Ming Lai, M.D.)
Whether a Chinese herbal medicine is anti cancer must be experimented with the advance laboratory analysis. In another word, Chinese herbal medicine needs to be scientifically examined.


(Dr. Hiroyuki Abe)
THL is a mixture of herbal medicine and its pharmacological mechanism is very clear. I specifically focused on the fast differentiation of the cancer cell. However, one of the characteristics of THL is able to interfere the differentiating part of cancer cell DNA.


(Dr. Obitsu Ryoichi, Ph.D.)
Since I visited Tungha in 1989, I got to know THL, which was a long time ago. THL is mainly used to prevent cancer recurrence and to treat patients with cancer recurrence.


(Dr. Andy Sun, Ph.D., D.D.S.:)
As a medical practitioner, I noticed that if patients with terminal stage cancer or given up by hospital treatments used such herbal product with out any effects. Consequently, I would not propose the idea of THL lab experiment because there would be a problem.

Many Terminal stage cancer patients, based on my experiences, who were sent to hospice care unit came to us. Since I was not God, I could only do my best to help them. Result showed that some survived for quiet a long time. Doctors were curious why he did not die.

With accumulated clinical experiences, we still wanted to find out how this herbal product works. Therefore, we initiated a five-year research project.

Our research has been accepted by the American journal of Chinese Medicine, even though the first paper faced many difficulties after submitting. We conducted 10 research papers because we experimented two diseases within 5 years and we were able to discover 10 issues.

We chose 15 human cancer cells. These 15 cancer cells were important cells in Taiwan, such as nasopharyngeal carcinoma cells, lung cancer cells, and cancer cells you could imagine.

Such herbal mixture is very interesting. We diluted 100 times, 1% works the best. We used TUNEL coloring on cancer cells. Apoptosis was very obvious. It was clear.

We also discovered its molecular mechanism. Two apoptosis mechanism were understood and submitted this research to international medical journal which is ranked the first among its field.


(Professor Won-Bo Wang, Ph.D.)
Cancer cells from all kinds of body organs such as stomach cancer cell, prostate cancer cell, lung cancer cell, liver cancer cell, T-lymphocyte cancer cell, breast cancer cell, were processed on the apoptosis effect experiment. There were 15 cancer cells in total.


(Professor Stephen Cho-Wing SZE, Ph.D.)
We chose 3 cancer cells, breast cancer cell, liver cancer cell and colon cancer cell. We have high incidence of breast cancer and colon cancer. Liver cancer occurs highly in china. Therefore we choose these 3 cancer cells and tried to find out whether THL can suppress them. Whether the growth of the cancer was suppressed will be explained later on our experiment on the effect of anti proliferation. We discovered that THL successfully suppressed these 3 cancer cells and suppressed the growth or stop the growth.


(Professor Won-Bo Wang, PH.D.)
Tumor has a few key characteristics.
- First, tumor cells will continue differentiating. Our normal cell does not differentiate but tumor cells will not stop differentiating.
- Second characteristics is that tumor cells usually has a so called anti-apoptotic mechanism. Simply speaking, if you are to treat such tumor cells with chemotherapy, after a while, chemotherapy usually becomes ineffective.


(Dr. Andy Sun, Ph.D., D.D.S.)
Tumor cells can be identified by immune system. It is to say that tumor cell would try to avoid the detecting from immune system and the harm from it.


(Dr Chi-Ming Lai, M.D.)
We know that stem cell is of 1% of a tumor and 1% of cell culture. It remains at such small amount. It always proliferates. It strongly resists chemotherapy and radiation therapy. Which means that treating stem cell with chemotherapy would not stop it from growing back.


(Professor Won-Bo Wang, PH.D.)
Two knives, one is to kill cancer cell, kill it and let it be dead, another knife is the immune reaction, which is to stimulate the immune system to kill cancer cells.


(Dr. Andy Sun, Ph.D., D.D.S.)
Most importantly, when I treat cancer cell, we induce apoptotic effect and regulated immunity in a great scale. We have two hands. One hand is to kill cancer cells directly and the other to modulate immunity which will create a stronger effect.


(Professor Won-Bo Wang, PH.D.)
We analyzed with TUNEL to identify the apoptosis of cancer cells. These cells are cervical carcinoma cell, liver cancer cell, nasopharyngeal carcinoma cell and colored with TUNEL. If you do not understand this experiment, the green colored cell means cancer cells were apoptotic.


(Dr. Andy Sun, Ph.D., D.D.S.)
This is breast duck cancer cell. THL was diluted to 1% and processed on it for 20 hours. You can see that the coloring was very clear, cancer cells were apoptotic. That THL can kill tumor cell directly can be identified with TUNEL coloring. It would induce cancer cell apoptosis.

Among cancer cells, cell nucleus were sliced piece by piece which is the cancer cell apoptosis. However, when processing on human umbilical cells, it shows no harm at all.


(Dr Chi-Ming Lai, M.D.)
I utilized the same technical platform on urine extract to evaluate the THL’s anti cancer effect. The result was very surprisingly amazing.


(Professor Won-Bo Wang, PH.D.)
We cultivated cancer cells on the dish for a while and used a sharp tool to scrape a mark to observe this cancer cells crawling speed into the scraped space. You can see that with out THL, the scraped space, 20 hours later, in the middle was filled. This means that cancer cells crawled over and almost filled up the space. If THL was processed, you can see on the experimented dish the gap among cancer cells appeared larger. This means that the crawling speed of the cancer cell to sill up the scraped space was slower and the ability was weakened. This is to tell you that THL can inhibit the migration of cancer cells,


(Dr Chi-Ming Lai, M.D.)
We got to know more about tumor stem cell. It could be the normal stem cell. Gene mutation might be the cause. Stem cell can be self renewal and clonogenetic. It might cause cancer in animals and differentiate into other non-stem cells. Most importantly, it is drug resistant.


(Professor Win-Ping Deng, PH.D.)
Looking at this cervical cancer cell at the dilution of 0.1-0.4, THL appeared to have obvious cancer inhibition. Therefore, we can calculate that at 0.2 diluted THL, it can inhibit half of the cancer cells.


(Dr Chi-Ming Lai, M.D.)
Stem cell in fact can be eradicated by THL. The more THL used, the more effective. Chemotherapy indeed, can not eradicate cancer stem-like cell. We discovered that side population cell was more drug resistant than non side population cell, but side population cell showed sensitive to THL, thus the inhibition of cancer stem-like cell colony was activated and the drug resistance effect was reversed.


(Dr. Hiroyuki Abe)
Recently, I integrated immune therapy with THL. Under the care of this integrated treatment, restoration of many patients’ health was observed.


(Dr. Obitsu Ryoichi, Ph.D.)
I was very impressed by an ovarian cancer patient who was at the third stage of cancer and survived for 15 years.


(Dr. Chi-Yuan Yeh, M.D.)
We provided THL to him during this period of time as a supplement. Before his treatment started and between the treatments, besides examining with blood cell and red blood cell, we also examined and evaluated the activity of T-lymphocyte which was an indication of the patient’s immunity system and how immunity performed.


(Dr. Jeng-Fong Chiou, M.D.)
For the past three months, we examined 100 patients. The examination was scheduled for three phases. The trial should be finished by the end of this month. As far as I could see on the report, I would like to congratulate you, the result showed very effective on increasing the activity of the T-lymphocyte. When the trial finishes by the end of this month, we expect to conclude a scientific report for your future reference.


(Dr Jean-San Chia)
In addition to the mechanisms of anti cancer and immunity, we will focus on the subject of anti-angiogenesis which is the innovative area of cancer treatment. We know about the growth of cancer. Because of the angiogenesis, cancer could grow very quickly. Thus, many anti cancer drugs were designed to be directed against not on cancer itself but on vessels, so called anti-angiogenesis drug. This is very new innovative field.

According to our data, we primarily estimated that THL could effect on angiogenesis. Professor Wang’s lab and our lab could work on the laboratory analysis focusing on angiogenesis. I think this field is worth carrying on. This is one vision in the future.


(Dr Chi-Ming Lai, M.D.)
The radiation and chemotherapy that we currently use aim to kill the already developed cells which could be seen. But for those metastatic cells or the tumor stem cells, out treatment could not be effective. Thus, integrating THL into our treatment for effective inhibition could be the future complementary and alternative therapy and an important theoretical foundation of cancer treatment.


(Professor Stephen Cho-Wing SZE, Ph.D.)
We hope that the result could inhibit cancer cells and activate the growth of the immune cells. This could be repeatedly analyzed in out animal experiments. We hope to see, in one or two years, such investigation on clinical trial. If our deed could help many cancer patients in the world by improving their quality of life or by helping them survive, this is what we want.


(Professor Narin Voravud, M.D.)
A cancer is a common disease. Even though, you are diagnosed with cancer, or your family has cancer. Don’t be disappointed or don’t be panic, it is better to select the best treatment, optimization of such treatment, integration of different modality of treatment, such as modern medicine, or if you prefer a complementary and alternative medicine, go to the specialist to identify such treatment.


(Dr Hiroyuki Abe)
I believe that patients have many worries. We are entering into the cancer treatable era. Based on the new cancer treatment development, and the driving of integrative medicine, cancer becomes treatable. Regardless of the stage of their cancer, patients will ultimately be cured. Therefore, never give up hope. Please keep up with high energy.

(Dr. Obitsu Ryoichi, Ph.D.)
When diagnosed with cancer, don’t be disappointed. There are many treatments in the world. Don’t give up hope. Among all the treatments, find out the one that is most suitable. The most important thing is moving on.


(Dr Chi-Ming Lai, M.D.)
Because of the advancement of medicine, many new cancer treatments including complementary and alternative medicine, have been integrated into the conventional treatment. Therefore, cancer treatment is promising in the future. Any cancer patients and their families should not be discouraged. Follow the direction of your doctor from your medical center, and procedures of the treatment with consideration of CAM. Curing cancer, indeed, is full of hope.