Which part sounds off to you? This looks like a very reasonable paper hoping to distill traditional medicine into viable research paths, and does it using a pretty interesting model of compounds and effects.

If all you see is jibber jabber, maybe you should just default to trusting the experts on this one? Like, it’s not in an obscure journal - it’s a highly regarded peer reviewed journal. The authors aren’t random, they’re researchers at some of the best universities in the world (Nanjing University ranks #7 on the Nature Index).

The abstract is about as plain-speaking as it gets in the world of cutting edge research. You can probably look up the handful of domain-specific terminology and have a good grasp at what the research is about.