[Introduction of "clinical pharmacognosy"--integration between pharmacognosy and clinical pharmacy].

In Japanese hospitals or pharmacies, crude drugs and natural products are used as the components of kampo medicine and dietary supplements. Clinical pharmacy can provide information such as the efficacy, adverse action, or interactions of crude drugs or natural products as well as chemical drugs. However, it is very difficult for a clinical pharmacist without a knowledge of pharmacognosy to offer full information, because crude drugs and natural products have very different pharmaceutical characteristics from chemical drugs containing a single compound. Drug information provided by such a pharmacist is sometimes ridiculous and may be misleading by suggesting the unusefulness of crude drugs. Therefore, in order to use crude drugs and kampo medicine effectively and safely, it is necessary to integrate the clinical pharmacy and pharmacognosy as "clinical pharmacognosy". Clinical pharmacognosy would also be capable of handling kampo medicine, a Japanese traditional medicine. Since basic pharmacognosy is a modern pharmaceutical science, pharmacognosists are limited in their understanding of a kampo formula and its clinical usefulness solely with a knowledge of that field. I suggest here that clinical pharmacognosy would better adopt the knowledge of traditional Chinese medicine that includes a theory of traditional pharmacology of the crude drugs used in kampo medicine.