Special Report – “Dangerous” or “effective” treatment?

Although it’s not known whether anyone has been cured of COVID-19 using only traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), in the last year and a half dozens of scientific articles have been published on the merits of TCM in combating the pandemic.

According to the paper Traditional Chinese medicine for COVID-19 treatment, “COVID-19 treatment practice has shown that early intervention with TCM is an important way to improve cure rate, shorten the course of disease, delay disease progression and reduce mortality rate. Furthermore, the reasons why TCM works could include not only inhibition of the virus, but that it might block infection, regulate the immune response, cut off the inflammatory storm and promote the repair of the body.”

The authors of Traditional Chinese Medicine in the Treatment of Patients Infected with 2019-New Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2): A Review and Perspective add that “TCM has accumulated a thousand years’ experience in the treatment of pandemic and endemic diseases. Provided that complementary and alternative treatments are still urgently needed for the management of patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection, the experiences of TCM are certainly worth learning.”

Another two examples, among several possible others, are Contribution of traditional Chinese medicine to the treatment of COVID-19, which reads “TCM has made contributions to the treatment of COVID-19 because of its efficacy and comprehensive therapeutic theory,” and Traditional Chinese Medicine treatment of COVID-19 (April 2020), which concludes “There is no effective treatment for COVID-19 thus far. However, during the treatment of COVID-19 in China, we found that the intervention of traditional Chinese medicine can reduce the severe symptoms of patients. The empirical therapy of Traditional Chinese Medicine has become widely used in Chinese hospitals now, and this therapy might be useful for people all around the world.”

The common factor here is that these four examples, all published in English, have Chinese authors, almost all from Mainland universities.

This trend prompted the BBC to publish a well-developed news piece a few months ago titled “China pushes traditional remedies amid outbreak”.

While acknowledging that “China’s National Health Commission has a special TCM chapter in its coronavirus guidelines” indicating that “six traditional remedies have been advertised as COVID-19 treatments” the BBC news piece quotes Edzard Ernst, a retired UK-based researcher of complementary medicines, who recently told the journal Nature, “We are dealing with a serious infection which requires effective treatments. For TCM, there is no good evidence, and therefore its use is not just unjustified, but dangerous.”

Nature’s headline reads “China is promoting coronavirus treatments based on unproven traditional medicines”, to which Chinese state media responded, quoting the State Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine statement that three formulas and three medicines “have proved” to be effective treatments for the disease.

China Daily has also reported that “comparative experiments” showed that a group of people with COVID-19 who took “Jinhua Qinggan”, herbal granules developed to combat H1N1 influenza in 2009, “got better faster than those who did not take the capsules and tested negative for the new virus more than two days sooner,” as quoted in Nature magazine.

The fact that the World Health Organization (WHO) revised its initial position, which originally discouraged the use of traditional remedies to treat COVID-19, has bolstered the Chinese argument.

While the WHO’s position on its official website in the first months of the outbreak was that TCM is “not effective against COVID-2019 and can be harmful”, the guidance has now been updated and the warning removed.

Certainly, TCM continues to divide the scientific community, with discussions now seeming more heated than ever.

Not only was an article by two Australian scientists – titled “The use of Traditional Chinese Medicines to treat SARS-CoV-2 may cause more harm than good” – controversial and contested, the authors now seem unwilling to revisit the subject. At least, they did not accept an invitation from Macau Business to better explain their points of view.

“Good emotions”

Xinhua (19 February 2020): “TCM has never lost a fight against epidemics in the country’s history.”

That same day, Professor Yong Hua Zhao, Institute of Chinese Medical Sciences, University of Macau, told the Lusa news agency that proper nutrition, rest and “good emotions” were a person’s best bet for protecting the immune system from coronavirus.

“The best methods to improve immunity are to ensure enough time for sleep and consumption of healthy food and nutrients (for example, vegetables with higher fiber content: carrots, beets and broccoli), as well as good emotion” – Yong Hua Zhao

Disagreeing with the Macau Government’s lack of guidance on the use of TCM in the treatment of COVID-19, Professor Zhao lamented, “Many Macau residents do not consume Chinese herbal remedies to improve immunity against novel coronavirus infection.”

According to the UM Professor TCM was not being used as a way of preventing COVID-19 and strengthening the immune system against the virus, because the “Government of Macau and the Health Bureau have not released guidelines for the use of Chinese herbal medicines as a preventive method for the novel coronavirus”.