title: What's past is prologue: Chinese medicine and the treatment of recurrent urinary tract infections.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Chinese herbal medicine (CHM) has a recorded history of over 2000 years that may be used to authenticate and guide modern treatments for disease, and also identify neglected but potentially useful treatment strategies. However this process is often based on over-simplistic conceptions of tradition and history that fail to take into account the dynamic nature of 'traditions' and underestimate the importance of contextual factors in their interpretation.
  
  
  METHODS
  As part of a process of defining good practice for a clinical trial of CHM for recurrent urinary tract infections, a selective review of classical Chinese medical texts was undertaken to investigate the historical treatment of urinary diseases specified by the traditional category of Lin diseases.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The historical review provided interesting insights into the evolution and meaning of Lin diseases and how pertinent data may be found, precisely, outside the boundaries of the categories on which the original investigation was premised. Although there were interesting parallels and continuities in the classical and modern understandings of the aetiology, pathophysiology and treatment of urinary diseases, there were also important divergences.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  It became apparent that, in the search for 'traditional' herbs to treat a particular modern syndrome it is essential to contextualise remedies, including as far as possible the intertextual, social, cultural, and gender context, and conditions of practice. Historical ethnopharmacology adds a level of subtlety and complexity to over-simplistic attempts at bioprospecting. Some insights that emerged from this historical review could inform the proposed clinical trial but these have had to be filtered through the constraints of modern regulatory procedures. Further research is required on how best to integrate the wealth of data that exists in historical texts with the desire to produce effective herbal products for the modern world.
authors.affiliation: China Centre for Health and Humanity, Department of History, UCL, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, United Kingdom. Electronic address: p.barrett@ucl.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Penelope
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Barrett
authors.affiliation: Complementary and Integrated Medicine Research Unit, Faculty of Medicine, University of Southampton, Aldermoor Health Centre, Aldermoor Close, Southampton SO16 5ST, United Kingdom. Electronic address: Andrew.Flower@soton.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Andrew
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Flower
authors.affiliation: China Centre for Health and Humanity, Department of History, UCL, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, United Kingdom. Electronic address: v.lo@ucl.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Vivienne
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Lo
mesh_terms: D008516:Medicine, Chinese Traditional; D008517:Phytotherapy; D012008:Recurrence; D014552:Urinary Tract Infections / Q000188:drug therapy*
keywords: Chinese herbal medicine; Clinical trial; Historical ethnopharmacology; Historical review; History; Urinary tract diseases