Moxa Tar, an important source for developing new anti-inflammatory drug

Abstract

Chronic inflammatory diseases are common and seriously affect people’s life, like COPD, Asthma, inflammatory bowel diseases, especially atherosclerosis related diseases (heart attack, stroke and peripheral blood vessel diseases). Many chronic inflammatory diseases are resistant to current anti-inflammatory drugs, like COPD and atherosclerosis related diseases, therefore there is an urgent need to develop new, disease modifying anti-inflammatory drugs. Moxa (Artemisia Argyi) is a plant. Moxa tar (or moxa smoke) is the burning product of its leaves. From clinical experiments, the author finds that Moxa tar has potent and unique anti-inflammatory effect. Its anti-inflammatory property is different from that of any current anti-inflammatory drugs. It not only can suppress chronic inflammation but also can terminate self-perpetuating chronic inflammation which is the underlying mechanism of many incurable inflammatory diseases (like COPD). The author thinks that moxa tar is an important source for developing new anti-inflammatory drug and would like to introduce its anti-inflammatory effect to researchers through his clinical experiments in this article. The methods used in this study are crossover design, i.e., patients serve as their own control, comparing the clinical symptoms and signs before and after moxa tar treatment. Introduction Chronic inflammatory diseases are common and seriously affect people’s life, like COPD, Asthma, atherosclerosis related diseases (heart attack, stroke and peripheral blood vessel diseases), inflammatory bowel diseases, chronic muscle and soft tissue injury and so on. Many chronic inflammatory diseases are resistant to current antiinflammatory drugs, like COPD and atherosclerosis related diseases and therefore there is an urgent need to develop new anti-inflammatory drugs. The current strategy of developing new anti-inflammatory drugs is to target and block certain step or steps in the inflammatory passway via competitive inhibition. Some new anti-inflammatory drugs have been developed, like phosphodiesterase-4 inhibitors, NF-KB inhibitors, adhesion molecule inhibitors, tumour necrosis factor-alpha inhibitors, leukotriene B4 inhibitors, interleukin I receptor inhibitors and so on. Some of these new drugs can suppress chronic inflammation and alleviate clinical symptoms to some extent, but hardly have any curative effect for chronic inflammation. From clinical practising, the author finds that moxa tar (or moxa smoke), a product of burning moxa leaves (Artemisia Argyi leaves), has potent and unique anti-inflammatory effect and it can treat many intractable chronic inflammatory diseases, like COPD, chronic muscle and soft tissue injury, chronic gastritis, angina pectoris, chronic laryngitis, thromboangiitis obliteran (Buerger’s disease) and pulmonary fibrosis. Its anti-inflammatory property is different from that of corticosteroid and other known anti-inflammatory drugs. It not only can treat some corticosteroid resistant chronic inflammation, but also can cure self-perpetuating chronic inflammation. If the active antiinflammatory ingredients of moxa tar can be identified and isolated to make a new drug and used systemically, it will revolutionize the treatment of chronic inflammatory diseases. But so far, moxa tar is alien to western medical field and its therapeutic value is unknown to drug developers. The author would like to introduce the anti-inflammatory effect of moxa tar to molecular biologists who are interested in developing new drugs. Artemisia Argyi, also called moxa or Chinese mugwort, is an herbaceous perennial plant. It is native to China, Korea, Mongolia, Japan and the Russian Far East. Its leaves have been used to treat various diseases by Chinese people for more than two thousand years. A traditional Chinese therapy using moxa is called moxibustion. It is to grind dried moxa (Artemisia Argyi) up to fluff and further process it into a cigar-shaped stick or cone. Practitioners burn this moxa stick to heat certain points (acupuncture points) on the patient’s skin or put the moxa cones on the acupuncture points and burn them to treat various diseases. This therapy has two thousand and five hundred years history in China (it is also practiced in Japan and Korea), but it is little known to western society. It is highly regarded by traditional Chinese herbalists claiming it can treat hundreds of different diseases, including many intractable cases, but its therapeutic value has been unfairly neglected since western medicine came into China. One of the reasons is that its mechanism is not clear. Chinese herbalists think moxibustion produces a special radiating heat which can penetrate the skin, give the body extra energy, warm the blood and open the body’s blocked meridian lines1 to improve the blood flow to treat diseases. This explanation is based on the theory of Traditional Chinese Medicine. This theory is neither understood nor Correspondence to: Qian Zeng, Medi7 Clinic Bentleigh, Australia, E-mail: qianzng@yahoo.com.au