China Approves Traditional Medicine To Treat COVID-19

Illustration of a shop selling traditional Chinese medicinal ingredients. (Wikimedia Commons / Edna Winti)

JAKARTA - The Government's National Medical Products Administration announced that China has approved three traditional Chinese medicinal products (TCM) to help treat COVID-19.

The agency is using a special approval procedure to give the green light to the three products, which provides more options for the treatment of COVID-19, the agency said in a statement.

The three traditional medicines are granules whose origins can be investigated according to ancient Chinese recipes and were tried out in the early days of the pandemic with the supervision of many academics and health experts.

"The traditional medicines are beads for lung cleansing and detoxification, beads for decomposing moisture and detoxifying, as well as granules for diffusing and detoxifying the lungs", said the statement.

The safety and effectiveness of TCM are still being debated in China, where it has adherents and skeptics. Although many treatments in TCM have been used for hundreds of years, critics argue that there is no verifiable scientific evidence to support their intended benefits.

In recent years, ancient medicine has repeatedly been hailed as a source of national pride by Chinese President Xi Jinping, who is also a well-known supporter of TCM. During the outbreak, Xi repeatedly urged doctors to treat patients with a mixture of traditional Chinese medicine and Western medicine.

"Traditional medicine is a treasure of Chinese civilization that embodies the wisdom of the nation and its people", Xi said at a national conference at TCM in October 2019.

Tens of thousands of COVID-19 patients received herbal treatments along with major antiviral drugs last year, according to the Ministry of Science and Technology.

"By adjusting the health of the whole body and enhancing immunity, TCM can help stimulate the patient's ability to fight and recover from disease, which is an effective means of therapy", Yu Yanhong, Deputy Head of National Traditional Chinese Medicine Administration, explained in March 2020.

Yu added that in a clinical trial of 102 patients with mild symptoms in Wuhan, patients with combined treatment had a 33 percent higher recovery rate, compared to the group that received only Western medicine.