 down the street and I bumped into a local construction worker that I knew that was working on one of the coffee shops so as I walked out of this cafe and I had my cup of coffee in my hand this construction worker and I got to talking and he said to me oh wow you practice Chinese medicine and you do acupuncture and use herbs but you're not one of those that uses these endangered animal parts right you're not like killing all these weird special mythical animals and it was kind of a harmless joke in passing but it really got me to think because so many people the first thing they think of when they think Chinese herbs is that we're killing all the endangered animals on earth now this is a very important thing to talk about so I thought I'd bring it up in today's video hey I'm Dr. Alex Hein Chinese medicine doctor and author of the health book Master of the Day now I've included two very important links below this video the first link is for if you want to become a patient of mine either locally or via telemedicine and the second is a free guide on four daily rituals that can help you add 10 years to your life with traditional Chinese medicine you can check those out right below this video the first link now look I'm not a vegan I'm not anti-vax I'm not here to share some PETA stats with you but I think this is a very very important discussion because the guy that I was talking to on the street had a very ignorant misinformed or uninformed opinion so in this video here I wanted to really take the opportunity and take the time to set some of these things straight so let's start with the headline drug companies kill about 25 million animals per year in research and developing and testing okay so I stumbled upon this article by the humane society and it suggested that estimated more than 25 million vertebrate animals are used annually in the research testing and education in the united states and we don't even really know the exact number or the exact amount it's easy to see if you're consuming an actual animal part like if you see a twig you know it's from a tree or a bush and if you see like a chicken leg you know it's from an animal but if you see a little white pill with a w on it well I don't know what that's from or where it comes from besides that I know it's from a lab but nobody knows or really thinks about the process that it took to synthesize this drug that someone's not taking for let's say diabetes and for many drugs the FDA even requires some degree of animal testing before a drug can be approved to be tested on a human being so check out some of these top drugs that are common in the united states you have the drug synthroid which is used for hypothyroid and it's tested on dogs rats and mice you have drugs like crestor for high cholesterol that are tested on beagle cute dogs cats monkeys rabbits mice and rats nexium a drug for heartburn or reflux is used on testing on beagle dogs rabbits mice and rats and essentially on and on and on this goes so millions and millions of animals sacrificed as part of the standard testing process and it makes sense you don't want to give something to a human if it's going to kill or harm an animal but this idea that chinese medicine is solely responsible for killing all the pangolins and that's why there's no more unicorns on earth or all the tigers tigers will be gone due to chinese medicine is pretty ridiculous and pretty uninformed so let's jump into the next idea here which is that animal testing has never been a part of traditional chinese medicine right so maybe you're thinking okay so we use animal parts just like conventional medicine uses animals for their research but chinese medicine was never tested on animals historically because for these ancient physicians in order to know how something worked you'd have to give it to the animal and then ask it how its stomach ache was but seeing as there were logistical problems and difficulties with doing that chinese herbs for example were always tested on human beings because you had to know what the effect was in the body with that specific illness it was never designed to be some kind of theoretical medicine with these mystics meditating on high who never saw patients i mean there's probably billions of collective patients over the last thousands of years that have gone through the process of taking chinese formulas documenting their results as well as the side effects and the people that were harmed and why they were harmed i mean that's that's the science and art of dosage it's a certain herb at one dosage will kill a person and at another dosage will be therapeutic that's not an easy thing to figure out in the field of medicine that's also why animal studies are used so in chinese medicine testing has only been done on animals recently and it's because of the introduction of biomedicine to china where china during the great leap forward and the communist revolution trying to prove that china you know should be the superpower that's taken seriously and part of that was getting rid of a lot of chinese medicine that seemed superstitious or seemed spiritual or mystical and a big piece of that was beginnings do testing and introducing western biomedical science to china and trying to apply that lens to chinese medicine sometimes effectively sometimes ineffectively so that is the only time where we've started to see now lab studies on rats and mice what happens if you inject the active constituent of ginseng into a rat what happens if you do an iv drip of certain chinese herbs or certain chinese formulas that's a fairly recent introduction to china so does chinese medicine use animal parts yes we use animal parts but nothing in my doctoral level training which is the highest level of training you can get in the united states that level of training and i specialize in chinese formulas and chinese herbs so if anything i would be the most likely to come across exotic animal parts for example so specifically though people seem to hone in on endangered and exotic animal parts tiger penis pangolin scales or tigers in general but pangolin scales uh shark fin soup all these kind of very specifically exotic sounding things the thing i've noticed is that this is more emphasized by folk medicine and folk doctors rather than those who have been through a classical an actual medical program that is licensed what's publicized in the news is so and so uses pangolin scales shark fin soup tiger penis bird nest soup whatever for some therapeutic benefit because it has the shock factor it has the oh my god that's like the news is they're professionals for hundreds of years at triggering you to click on something because that's how they make their income and what is an easy way to trigger you with chinese medicine this far off witch doctory sounding thing and then they're buying all the tiger penises and throwing the bodies away and they're killing the tigers for these ancient hong kong fertility tonics right so try to see through the marketing try to see through the the shock factor there's a very very very serious clinical efficacious medicine behind it and it's not always easy to siphon out what is and what isn't right guys that's what i got for you today now again if you'd like to become a patient the first link below this video is how to become one of my patients and everything about my clinic where to find me and i've also included this case study of a guy right below this video named li qin yun who supposedly lived to be over a hundred years old doing these four practices now the four practices he shared in a new york times magazine article and i think they're very very good so i've shared them with you in that free article down below this video and before you go i have two more videos for you related right here