Abstract:It is very common to apply toxic traditional Chinese medicines to the treatment of incurable diseases today.But the clinical application of toxic medicines is often limited by their toxicity.This problem is usually solved by the special technology called ‘Chinese medicine processing’.Fermentation is one of the traditional methods of ‘Chinese medicine processing’.Combined with modern biological techniques,it is affecting all areas of traditional Chinese medicine in China.Based on the analyses of the literatures,this paper suggests that processing by fermentation can be applied to three kinds of raw materials of toxic Chinese materia medica,i.e.,plants,animals and minerals,to attenuate their toxicity and synergize their effect.It can also be concluded that processing by fermentation could not only protect active centers of the original components from destruction,but also modify structures of the poisonous components,thereby expanding indications of the toxic Chinese medicines.So we think that fermentation processing provides a new approach of toxicity reducing and efficacy enhancing for toxic Chinese materia medica.
