[Review of taste masking techniques in Chinese patent medicine]

Single herbs and Chinese patent medicine preparations often have bad taste, such as bitterness and astringency, which is one of the key factors affecting patients' medication compliance, and would affect the therapeutic effect and restrict the extensive application in clinical practice. Therefore, how to make use of taste masking techniques to improve the bad taste of traditional Chinese medicines has become an important project. Through the collection and summarization of Chinese and foreign journals and papers in recent years, this paper discussed the generation mechanism of bitter taste, the new methods of masking bitter taste and the evaluation me-thods of bitter taste, in order to provide references for the taste masking of Chinese patent medicines preparations.