Coronavirus: 85 per cent of patients in China benefiting from traditional Chinese medicine, officials claim
- Ancient remedies play a complementary role to Western drugs in fighting the potentially deadly infection, officials, doctors say
- But others say TCM works only as a placebo and that people who say they have benefited would have recovered anyway
While acknowledging that the ancient practice has no specific treatments for Covid-19 – the pneumonia-like disease caused by the virus, which has sickened over 82,000 people and killed more than 2,800 since the outbreak began in central China in December – some experts said they had witnessed a higher recovery rate among those using both TCM and Western drugs, than solely mainstream treatments.
Xu Nanping, a vice-minister of science and technology, said last week that about 85 per cent of patients in China had been given the combined treatment.
China’s National Health Commission prescribes the use of TCM alongside Western drugs in its guidelines for the treatment of people infected with the coronavirus.
Song Juexian, a doctor with the integrated TCM and Western medicine unit at Xuanwu Hospital in Beijing, said traditional Chinese medicine had the benefit of enhancing the patients’ “internal balance”.
