ABSTRACT
The usage of Kampo medicine has been expanding in hospitals and pharmacies, and the systematic education on Kampo medicines and their components is urgently needed. Although the efficacies of Kampo formulations are approved at the national level, those of the composing crude drugs are not approved individually except for some cases. Consequently, the efficacy description of individual crude drug in textbooks differs much depending on the authors. To clarify this situation, we suggested the standardized description of the efficacy of crude drugs used in ethical Kampo formulation using terms of modern Western medicine in the previous study. In this study, we reviewed the descriptions of efficacies using the terms of Kampo medicine in the books published in Japan from the 17 century to the present to explore the possibility of standardizing the crude drug efficacies using the terms of Kampo medicine. The proposal for standardized description of the efficacy of crude drugs was based on the high frequency of appearance of the terms in successive books.