[Increasing dosage: a momentous proposition to improve therapeutic efficacy of traditional Chinese medicine].

To explore a key approach for improving therapeutic efficacy of traditional Chinese medicine by means of increasing its dosage. The rationality, necessity and feasibility of this proposition were explained and verified by the retrospective and prospective analysis about the current situation of therapeutic efficacy of traditional Chinese medicine, the relationship between dosage and therapeutic efficacy of traditional Chinese medicine, the rationality of conventional dosage specification. The unremarkable therapeutic efficacy was the main reason of traditional Chinese medicine to be denounced frequently, which was heavily due to its low dosage. However, many cases showed excellent therapeutic efficacy if a big dosage was used. Compared with the clinical dosage of western medicine and curative dose of active substance from traditional Chinese medicine or crude drugs, the specification of the conventional dosage of traditional Chinese medicine failed to be rigorous and objective. The viewpoint of "Cooking pot size limitation" and "Human stomach size limitation" may be the bottleneck which restricted the increase of traditional dosage. In conclusion, to increase the dosage of traditional Chinese medicine and elucidate the relationship between dosage and therapeutic efficacy would be a momentous and essential method to improve the therapeutic efficacy of traditional Chinese medicine.