Chinese herbal treatment for diabetes-Its history is millennial, but it now requires peer-reviewed double-blind research.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21359928

Chin J Integr Med. 2011 Mar;17(3):235-40. Epub 2011 Feb 27.
Research progress on the mechanism of single-Chinese medicinal herbs in treating diabetes mellitus.
Yang LX, Liu TH, Huang ZT, Li JE, Wu LL.

Institute of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Gansu Province Academy of Chinese Medicine, Lanzhou, 730050, China.
Abstract
Treating diabetes mellitus (DM) with Chinese medicine (CM) has had a few thousands years of history. Past Chinese medical texts had already recorded numerous medicinal herbs as well as recipes for treating DM and accumulated much clinical experience. In the following article, the prevention of DM using CM in the past 5 years is retrospectively studied, and mainly focuses on the usage of simple Chinese herbal extracts or monomers in terms of cellular as well as molecular biology.