Medicinal herbs have been traditionally used for a variety of purposes, particularly to prevent and treat a variety of diseases including cancer. Some of the most important chemotherapeutic agents used in the treatment of breast cancer are derivatives of herbal remedies. These include the taxanes obtained from the Pacific yew tree, Taxus brevifolia reserpine, and vincristine and vinblastine which are obtained from the Rosy periwinkle shrub. The use of botanical medicine is widespread in all regions of the developing world and is rapidly growing in industrialized countries especially among patients diagnosed with life-threatening diseases such as cancer.
Despite their broad use, there exists insufficient scientific data on the safety and efficacy of many of the herbal therapies. Recently, a large in vitro study on the effect of more than 70 Chinese herbs extracts on growth of five breast cancer cell lines found that 21% of the herbal extracts demonstrated more than 50% growth inhibition on at least 4 from the 5 cell lines [1].
The emphasis of the Chinese medicine is on the treatment of the body as a whole. Chinese medicine views include a three-fold approach of using herbs that treat (I) the vitality (tonifying herbs), (II) the cancer (anti-cancer herbs) and (III) the side effects of chemotherapy.
In the Materia Medica of Chinese medicine [2], these herbs are selected from 8 classic categories (which are used traditionally to categorize Chinese herbs): (1) herbs that tonify the Qi; (2) herbs that tonify Blood; (3) herbs that clear heat and relieve toxicity; (4) herbs that clear heat and fire; (5) herbs that regulate the flow of Qi; (6) herbs that drain “dampness”; (7) herbs that invigorate the blood; and (8) herbs that tonify the Yin.