How Is Traditional Chinese Herbal Medicine Made? From Raw Herbs To Extracts

Picture drawers and bins filled with a menagerie of exotic dried roots, bark, berries, seeds, and flowers. That’s the scene in a Chinatown traditional herbal shop. 

How do those same herbs transform into convenient tablets or concentrated granules? How do we get from gnarly-looking dried root (like ginger) to a TCM nutritional supplement you can wash down with breakfast?

Traditional Chinese herbal medicine comes in several forms. ActiveHerb.com primarily offers three: bulk herbs, concentrated extract granules and tablets. They may start with many of the same plants, but how they’re processed is a different story.

Bulk Herbs: The Old-School Approach

Bulk herbs are about as close as you can get to Chinese herbal medicine in its traditional form.

These are actual pieces of the plant: roots, rhizomes, bark, leaves, seeds, fruits and other botanical materials that have been harvested, cleaned, dried and usually cut or sliced. Some herbs undergo additional traditional preparation, such as steaming, roasting or processing with honey or rice wine, depending on how the herb is intended to be used.

Raw, bulk herbs are probably the form most people picture when they imagine a traditional Chinese apothecary. There’s no glossy coating or gummy bears here.

Traditionally, multiple bulk herbs are combined according to a formula and decocted. This means they are simmered in water to make a strong medicinal tea.

If you miss the aroma of moldy gym socks wafting through the locker room during seventh-grade PE, you may feel surprisingly nostalgic while simmering certain Chinese herbs on your stove.

Cooking raw herbs can take several hours, but the payoff is customization. A TCM practitioner can select individual herbs and adjust their amounts to create a formula specifically for you. It’s like the ancient version of a compounding pharmacy. 

Extract Granules: Bulk Herbs Without the Cooking

Extract granules essentially move much of that kitchen work into a modern manufacturing facility.

The process begins with the raw herb, which is identified and tested for quality. It is then extracted in water, similar in principle to making the traditional decoction described above.

Instead of handing you the resulting liquid, however, manufacturers concentrate it and remove most of the water. ActiveHerb’s extracts are concentrated at low temperatures and then spray-dried into granules. Depending on the herb and its natural extraction yield, ActiveHerb’s single-herb granules can reach concentration ratios of up to 30:1.

The result is herbal instant tea.

Measure the granules, mix them into hot water and you’ve essentially skipped the chopping, simmering, straining and wondering whether your kitchen will ever smell normal again.

Granules also retain one of the big advantages of bulk herbs: customization. Practitioners and consumers can combine several single-herb extracts to create individualized formulas without preparing a new pot of herbs every day.

For modern life, that’s a pretty compelling compromise between tradition and convenience.

Tablets and Capsules: The Grab-and-Go Version of TCM

Then there are tablets, the form that probably looks most familiar to American consumers.

But a concentrated Chinese herbal tablet isn’t necessarily just dried herbs pulverized and compressed into a pill.

For ActiveHerb’s Guang Ci Tang formulas, the herbs are first cleaned and combined according to the traditional recipe. The mixture is then extracted in water inside a controlled extraction tank, basically the industrial descendant of simmering herbs in a pot. (Never heard of Guang Ci Tang? Think of it like the Toyota of TCM brands: established, dependable and widely trusted.)

After extraction, the leftover plant material is removed and the liquid is concentrated into a paste. A small amount of powdered herb from the original formula can then be added so the concentrate can be formed into tablets without relying heavily on unnecessary binders.

Guang Ci Tang tablets are produced at a 5:1 concentration. This means that one gram of finished tablets represents five grams of raw herbs. 

Capsules

Capsules are processed much like tablets: the herbs are extracted and concentrated, but instead of pressing the finished extract into tablets, it goes inside a capsule shell. ActiveHerb’s Modern Essentials line uses this familiar capsule format for contemporary herbal formulas designed around modern wellness needs — a few examples: Weight Management; Hair; Mood — while drawing on Traditional Chinese Medicine principles.

Capsules vs. Tablets

Tablets give you more of the traditional herbal experience. You can often smell and taste the herbs. A typical serving is usually about five or six tablets. Meanwhile, capsules are generally odor-free and usually require only about two per serving.

Like extract granules, the obvious advantage of tablets and capsules is convenience.

Which Form Of Chinese Herbal Medicine Is Best?

There isn’t one answer for everybody.

Bulk herbs offer maximum traditional customization but require the most preparation.

Extract granules offer much of that flexibility with far less work.

Tablets and capsules offer the greatest grab-and-go convenience, particularly for established formulas that don’t need to be customized ingredient by ingredient.

In other words, the herbs haven’t necessarily changed as much as the delivery system has.

“Wan”na Learn About Other Forms Of Chinese Herbs?

You may also see traditional formulas sold as Wan, commonly translated as tea pills. They’re the small round herbal pills familiar to generations of Chinese medicine users. Pian, meanwhile, means tablet. ActiveHerb’s Wan and Pian versions of the same formulas contain the same herbal ingredients and are extracted using the same process; the principal difference is their final form.

Other traditional preparations include San, or powdered herbs, and Tang, the decoctions made by cooking herbs in water.

From a pot bubbling with roots and bark to concentrated granules and tablets, the packaging has certainly evolved. But the basic idea has remained steady through the ages: Start with the herbs, extract what traditional herbalists wanted from them, and find a practical way to get them into you.

Reference:

Qiu R, Zhang X, Zhao C, Li M. Comparison of the efficacy of dispensing granules with traditional decoction: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Ann Transl Med. 2018;6(3):38.