Then you think, in order to achieve the therapeutic effect, wouldn’t it be necessary to eat thousands of medicinal herbs?

Human stomachs are limited and cannot eat thousands of grasses, so they have to take medicine year after year.

This is why most herbal medicines are slow-acting, and this is why most herbal medicines need to be taken for a long time."

"Tian Bu, you ask why we need to extract herbal medicines. This is to extract the essence of the medicine and eliminate the toxins.

The second is to increase the dose and enhance the efficacy.

What you said, do you hear me clearly?"

Tian Bu nodded solemnly.

What Li Mengxi said was very profound pharmacological knowledge. Tian Bu was greatly inspired after listening to it.

Tian Bu stood up, took two steps back, then bowed seriously to Li Mengxi, saying thank you for the advice.

Li Mengxi smiled and accepted Tian Bu's gift.

Afterwards, Li Mengxi invited Tian Bu to sit down, and then continued to teach Tian Bu how to extract the medicine.

In the subsequent narration, Li Mengxi and Tian Bu briefly talked about the classification of solutions, such as alkaline solution, acid solution, grease solution, alcohol solution, and aqueous solution.

These solutions of different properties are the basis for extracting drugs.

In Li Mengxi's account, all medicinal substances, no matter what they are, are either soluble in one or two of these solutions, or in one of them, or of course, may not be soluble at all.

Tian Bu was confused at this time and asked, "Since it's not dissolved, doesn't it mean it can't be extracted?"

Li Mengxi smiled, "That's not the case. Although the medicine is insoluble, on the other hand, in addition to medicine, other useless or toxic things may be soluble.

If a medicinal herb is insoluble but its toxins are soluble, can this herb be soaked?

If the toxins in the herbs dissolve into the water, then if you pick up the herbs and take them, won’t the toxins be removed?”

What Li Mengxi was talking about was the reverse method. After Tian Bu heard this, he suddenly became enlightened.

As Li Mengxi said, there may be some tricky drugs that do not dissolve anything, but this does not mean that the drugs cannot be extracted. On the contrary, if the drugs cannot be extracted, the toxins and useless substances can be extracted.

For example, if red beans are mixed in a pile of mung beans, and the red beans are picked out, the red beans are extracted; conversely, if the mung beans are picked up, aren't the rest just red beans? In this way, the red beans are also extracted.

During Li Mengxi's narration, Tian Bu roughly understood the method of extracting the medicine.

All kinds of medicines and herbs can be extracted using this method.

After Li Mengxi taught Tian Bu the extraction method, he thought for a while and told him about the difficulties in the extraction process, "Drug extraction, the method is simple, but the process is difficult.

The first difficulty is to identify the properties of medicinal herbs. Among herbal medicines, there are many substances. Some are soluble in water, some are soluble in vinegar, and some are soluble in strong liquor.

This chapter is not over yet, please click on the next page to continue reading! However, I don’t know whether the medicinal substances are dissolved in vinegar or alcohol, so I can only give it a try.

But if you want to test a drug, you must test the drug according to the symptoms. If you want to test the drug according to the symptoms, you can't test it on only one or two patients. You must have dozens or even hundreds of patients before you can be sure of its use.

It is difficult to find patients, and it is even harder to find hundreds of patients. It will take a long time to try hundreds of patients. The complexity and difficulty involved are astonishing.

Moreover, these medicines are all poisonous. If the herbs are taken directly, there will be very little medicine and very little poison among the herbs. If the herbs are taken raw, even if they are poisonous, there will be no serious harm after taking them.

However, if the extraction method is used, if tens of thousands of herbs are extracted from one cup, the medicine will be the same and the poison will be the same. The poison extracted from this cup is equivalent to the toxins from thousands of medicinal plants gathered together. In this way, when testing the medicine

, one careless move will poison countless people.

Human life is precious, and one herb can poison dozens or hundreds of people. There are thousands of medicines in the world, so why shouldn’t they poison hundreds of thousands of people?"

Tian Bu himself is not afraid of testing medicines, nor is he afraid of dying after testing medicines, but when Li Mengxi said that the drugs extracted by the extraction method are a thousand times more toxic, dying a hundred thousand times may not be enough to test the potency of the medicine. Tian Bu

His brows were furrowed.

Before Tian Bu could come up with a countermeasure, Li Mengxi came up with the solution.

Li Mengxi said, "Human life is precious and cannot be used up. It can be replaced by livestock."

Tian Bu looked up at Li Mengxi.

Li Mengxi continued, "For example, apes. The internal organs of apes are very similar to humans, and they can be used as substitutes for testing drugs."

"... Pigs seem to be fine too," Li Mengxi scratched his head and thought for a moment, "I seem to have heard that pigs have similar eating habits to humans and their internal organs are also similar to humans.

What can poison pigs can certainly poison people. If pigs can eat it, people can probably eat it too.

Before testing the medicine, give it to a pig first. If the pig does not die, then give it to a monkey. If the monkey does not die, then try it on a human."

Li Mengxi came up with a solution to the problem of drug testing in just a moment. Tian Bu admired Li Mengxi very much.

The first difficulty in extracting medicine is to determine its properties.

Later, Li Mengxi continued to talk to Tian Bu about other difficulties in drug extraction, "The second difficulty in drug extraction lies in the intricate combination of drugs and taboos."

Having said this, Li Mengxi raised his head and asked Tian Bu, "Tian Bu, when you are dispensing medicines, do you think that the medicines are in conflict with each other? For example, some medicines cannot be used together, because taking them together will cause death."

Tian Bu nodded, "There is such a taboo in pharmacology."

"That's it. If it's an herbal medicine, the dosage is low, and it really has side effects, so taking it won't cause any serious harm.

The method of extraction is to condense thousands of medicinal plants into one portion. If two medicines conflict with each other, it will be a big deal if they are used together."

At this point, Li Mengxi suddenly smiled and asked Tian Bu a question, "Tian Bu, assuming there are a hundred kinds of medicines, how many prescriptions can there be if the two are combined?

If three medicines are combined, how many prescriptions can be produced?

If four medicines are combined, how many should be taken?

What about the five medicines, six medicines and seven medicines?”

Li Mengxi's question stopped Tian Bu.

Tian Bu frowned and thought for a long time, unable to give an answer.

Hundreds of medicines, two-phase combination, three-phase combination, four-phase combination, or even ten-phase combination, this is a combination problem.

Hundreds of medicines, two-phase combination, there are combinations, 100x99 divided by two, there are 4950 combinations.

Three-phase matching, there are combinations, 100x99x98 divided by 1x2x3, there are combinations.

The four phases are matched, and there are various combinations.

When Li Mengxi took the pen and calculated for a while, when he reached the fourth step, he found that there were more than three million combinations.

After thinking about it, I tested more than three million prescriptions one by one. Assuming that each prescription consumes one monkey on average, then three million monkeys are needed.

Are there so many monkeys in the Han Dynasty?

Furthermore, this is a four-phase combination. In traditional Chinese medicine prescriptions, dozens or twenty herbs are often mixed together. The active ingredients of these herbs are extracted, hundreds of different substances are extracted, and then various arrangements and combinations are made.

Damn it, there are millions and tens of millions of combinations, I have to try them in the year of the monkey and the month of the horse.

After losing his pen, Li Mengxi looked at Tian Bu and said, "Um, Tian Bu. From now on, the extracted medicines can be used alone. There is no need to mix or test them."

Theoretically speaking, when different drugs are paired with each other, the efficacy will be broader and more useful.

However, it is too difficult to test.

There are hundreds of combinations of medicines, with more permutations and combinations than there are stars in the Milky Way.

In a few words, Li Mengxi and military doctor Tian Bu decided on the method of administering the extracted drugs in the future. That is, the extracted drugs should be used alone as much as possible and not in combination with any other drugs. Because once they are used in combination, they must be used together.

The difficulty lies in exploring whether there will be adverse reactions between drugs.

There are too many types of drug extracts and they are too complicated. Li Mengxi calculated that the number of permutations and combinations of drugs is so despairing.
Chapter completed!