Proponents of traditional Chinese medicine have met the head of the World Health Organization to present a report on its use in the fight against Covid-19.
The delegation led by Huang Luqi, a vice-commissioner of the National Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine, met Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in Geneva on Monday.
A statement published on the administration’s website on Wednesday said the report from the Chinese Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine “systematically evaluates the effectiveness and safety of traditional Chinese medicine using scientific methods”, adding that Tedros had received the report “with delight”.
Tedros wrote on Twitter that he met Huang to “discuss the role of traditional Chinese medicine in improving people’s health”.
Huang said China had been working with the WHO and had made important contributions to the development of global traditional medicine.
China’s leaders have given strong support to TCM and the national guidelines on fighting Covid include several traditional treatments.
The prescribed treatments cover a range of symptoms from the mildest ones to critical illness. Some can be drunk while others are administered by intravenous injection.
On Wednesday the city of Tianjin, which is battling hundreds of Omicron cases many involving school pupils, published its first guidelines on treating children with TCM with the support of the National Health Commission and Zhang Boli, president of Tianjin University of Traditional Chinese Medicine.
Traditional medicine is controversial within China and critics have branded it unscientific citing a lack of clinical trials. In 2020, of 1.67 million adverse drug reactions and incidents in the country, 13.4 per cent were reported to be related to traditional medicine.
It is also far from winning global acceptance, although one treatment recommended in China’s national guidelines for treating Covid-19 symptoms, Lianhua Qingwen, has been given registration approval and import licences in almost 30 countries and territories, according to the manufacturers.
This week, the Pakistani health authorities announced the results of a clinical trial of another traditional Chinese treatment, Jinhua Qinggan Granules, which are being used to treat coronavirus patients.
The treatment was given to 300 mild to moderate Covid-19 patients, and scientists from the International Centre for Chemical and Biological Science found it had an efficacy rate of almost 82.7 per cent, according to Reuters.
The practice passed a major milestone in achieving international recognition in May 2019 when the World Health Assembly approved a chapter on traditional medicine in the latest version of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, which sets the global standard for diagnostic health information.
President Xi Jinping has called for a combination of traditional and modern treatments to be used to fight the disease and for scientific research platforms to be established to develop TCM.
Last May he said China had been relying on traditional medicine for thousands of years and major epidemics such as severe acute respiratory syndrome and Covid-19 have promoted a deeper understanding of the practice.
He added that China should emphasise the use of modern science to explain traditional medicine.
medicine with an emphasis in explaining it in modern science, he said.