Bear bile is a precious Chinese herbal medicine. Because the supply is scarce, adulterated products are found from time to time. Some use the bile of pigs, cattle, sheep and other livestock to forge bear bile, and some use three needles or yellow extracts and sugar to forge counterfeit products. The identification method is as follows:

1. Take a little bear bile powder in your hand and put it on your palm. After rubbing with hands dipped in water, it has a strong viscosity, a sense of rotation and a unique fragrance, which is authentic.

2. The taste is bitter and sweet, and it has a cool and lasting feeling of tongue drilling, or if you put a small piece in your mouth, you can completely dissolve the cool throat and chew it without sticking your teeth. Fakes are bitter and smelly.

3. Take a glass of clean water and add water, and put a bear gall and a small particle the size of a rice grain on the water surface, which shows that it dissolves quickly and the pigment sinks into the bottom of the cup without spreading. However, the bile of cattle and sheep dissolves slowly, with less pigment and white flocculent insoluble matter. The dissolution rate of pig bile is faster than that of cattle and sheep bile, but slower than that of bear bile.

4. Take a little bear bile and put it on the iron sheet. It's really not lit by fire, it's just bubbling, and there's no obvious smell. Fakes don't melt after burning. For example, the bile of pigs, cows and sheep will also foam after burning, but it has obvious fishy smell and emits the burnt smell of bone glue.

5. Take bear bile powder by fluorescence and observe it under ultraviolet lamp. Those with yellow-white fluorescence are genuine products, and those with fake products are brown-yellow fluorescence. Or take about 0.2g bear bile and dissolve it in 20ml of 7% glacial acetic acid solution, and observe the solution under ultraviolet lamp. If it is light blue and opacified, it will fluoresce.