Abstract
Many kinds of water products have been offered commercially suggesting some strange efficacy beyond our scientific knowledge even now at which various advanced scientific and technological research have been highly promoted. However, it seems quite obvious that such a strange efficacy must be nonexistent. If such efficacy were really existing, it must be solved by some suitable scientific procedure. In this study, the extraction of paeoniflorin from paeoniae radix was examined by varying the kind of extracting water. Then, the result was analyzed using multivariate analysis where the effect on the extraction was assumed to be ascribed to the ionic species dissolved in each water examined. The dissolved species were analyzed by chemical and instrumental analyses. According to the multivariate analysis, the amount of extracted paeoniflorin (Y) was presented by the following regression equation. The result shows that pH, [Ca2+], and [HCO3 −] were significant parameters and the combination of Ca2+ and HCO3 − affected negatively on the extraction of paeoniflorin.
Y=28.11−0.71 pH−0.0034[Ca2+]−0.93[HCO3 −]
where [Ca2+] is the concentration of calcium ion and [HCO3 −] is that of bicarbonate ion.
