Many of the students belonging to the School of Health and Social Services will be responsible for health education in the future, and it is important that they have an understanding of the importance of Kampo medicine and the ability to give appropriate guidance in the field. But their educational goals need discussing. We conducted lectures on Kampo medicine with medical school students towards this end, and conducted before and after questionnaire surveys to gauge their effect. Students with a desirable degree of awareness toward Kampo medicine in Japanese society increased from 58.0 ± 15.4% to 88.5 ± 10.2%, and students judging Kampo as either useful or extremely useful rose from 58.4% to 95.9%. It is our hope that, with the raised awareness from these lectures as a base, these students will go on to engage in suitable medical educational activities in the future.

Wernicke’s encephalopathy, an acute neuropsychiatric syndrome caused by thiamine (vitamin B1 ) deficiency, is associated with serious clinical disease and can be fatal. It has rarely been reported in infants and children. We report a case of a 3-year-old girl with Wernicke’s encephalopathy. The patient’s diet had been severely unbalanced since the age of 2 years, and for about a month prior to admission to our hospital had consisted almost exclusively of polished white rice and noodles. Her clinical symptoms supported thiamine deficiency-related neuropathy. Brain MRI findings revealed abnormalities consistent with pediatric Wernicke’s encephalopathy with involvement of the putamen. The diagnosis prompted thiamine replacement therapy, to which the patient showed an excellent response.
Central Nervous System

To investigate the effectiveness of Maobushisaishin-to (traditional Japanese herbal medicine; Tsumura TJ-127) in treating the common cold, a clinical comparison between Maobushisaishin-to and a general common cold drug was conducted using the sealed envelope method. The study involved 83 patients in the TJ-127 group and 88 patients in the general cold drug group. No differences in age, gender or the period from the onset of the disease to the beginning of treatment were observed between the two groups.
The results indicated greater than moderate improvement in 81.9% of the TJ-127 group, compared with 60.3% of the compound cold drug group (p<0.01). Further analysis of symptom diaries kept by the patients indicated that TJ-127 provided more rapid relief for symptoms such as fever, feeling feverish, coughing and phlegm than did the general cold drug. No side effects were observed for the TJ-127. These results suggest that TJ-127 is effective in the treatment of the common cold.