In Chinese herbalism today, there appears to be little if any effort underway in the direction of standardization. For the average consumer buying OTC herbs or patent formulas, it is impossible to know with much certainty what is being consumed. If you have a dozen standard references handy, it is possible to determine many of the ingredients with a fair degree of accuracy. However, many ingredients simply cannot be determined because of errors or inadequacy of the herb name, or because of possible herb substitution. Finally, it is not easy to gather primary research references and to ferret out the best or most relevant research papers dealing with Chinese herbs.
Some research identifies an herb only by vernacular pinyin or English name.
Other papers report on herbs that are identified only to a botanical genus, without any indication of which species were used. Almost no papers indicate that herb substitution was checked for and ruled out. Many papers report on patent formulas, and some of these do not list specific ingredients for proprietary commercial reasons. All research on mixtures of herbs, regardless of quality of experimental design, must be treated with caution because of the chemical cocktail problem mentioned above. Few research papers pay enough attention to the problem of multiple names for particular herbs and the difficulties this presents in searching the literature, as for example in doing Medline searches.