Chinese traditional medicine is mostly hokum, like any alternative medicine, some herbs may well have curative properties but it is usually due to a single compound or class of compounds hitting a specific molecular target.
I can well see the alt-med crowd cry aloud that without the ‘entire natural herb’ the medicinal benefits would be lost, but then again they also believe in homeopathy - where a medicine is diluted to nothing but water that they claim retains some molecular memory of the medicine/toxin that it once contained.