Monday - June 29, 2020

Plenty Yuan Made Selling Traditional Chinese Medicine For COVID

I see saffron, star anise, mushrooms, black pepper, cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, shredded garlic and a couple other seed or fruit things. Looks like a nice spice mix for some curry. If the mix is 1800 years old, it can’t exactly be a secret formula, can it?

Spice mix fights COVID and wins? Heard about this a couple months ago; they were going to sell tons of it to Africa and make billions.

Question is, does it actually work? Do we have “official” studies, or is this “merely anecdotal”? Or total BS?

Chinese medicine makers have reaped stunning results in the first quarter.

One of China’s treatments for Covid-19 is a controversial traditional Chinese medicine inspired by a medical textbook written 1,800 years ago. The huge popularity of the drug – the Lianhua Qingwen capsule – has produced massive fortunes for the company behind it, as well as its shareholders.

Beyond the increased sales from the coronavirus pandemic, however, traditional remedy makers still face an uphill battle to prove their medical efficacy, maintain their domestic market share and win recognition overseas.

“Sales income from the Lianhua Qingwen capsule almost doubled in the first quarter of this year,” said Wu Xiangjun, general manager of Shijiazhuang Yiling Pharmaceutical, which produces the drug, in a written exchange with the South China Morning Post. “We continue to actively push for the product to be registered and sold overseas.”

The capsule, developed in 2003 to treat severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars), extracts the essence of 13 herbs based on prescriptions that date back to classic medical texts written during the Han dynasty (206BC–220AD).

In February, it became part of China’s national standard therapy for Covid-19 patients, along with two other traditional Chinese medicine formulas. There is currently no known cure for the disease.

Chinese embassies also included it in a care package sent to Chinese students overseas alongside masks and disinfecting wipes. The drug is now sold for as much as £19 (US$24) on e-commerce site eBay in the UK for a box that is priced at about 25 yuan (US$4) in China.

Thanks in part to officials’ promotion and support, the pandemic has cemented the important role of traditional Chinese medicine in the country’s health care system, despite intense controversies over its effectiveness. It accounts for 18 per cent to 30 per cent of China’s 2 trillion yuan (US$283 billion) drug market, according to various estimates.

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Related:

[ June 1 ] Customs officers seized tens of thousands of capsules of a Chinese medication falsely advertised as a treatment for COVID-19.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers seized three parcels of Lianhua Qingwen Jiaonang on Tuesday at the International Mail Facility at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. Each box contained 9,600 capsules for a total of 28,800 capsules and a total domestic value of $28,797, according to a news release. All of the shipments originated from China.

The medication is known to have been used to treat some COVID-19 patients in China and other countries. But its effectiveness is unknown and it remains an unapproved medicine for use in the United States.

So if it hasn’t been tested or trialed, it’s kind of wrong to say it’s falsely labeled. “Unapproved” might be a better descriptor. But right now it can’t be packaged as a medicine and distributed in the USA. Maybe they should label the pills “seasoning for one garden salad”?



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Speaking of untested and unapproved ...

Randomized controlled trials(RCTs) regarding Lianhua Qingwen Capsules for treatment of viral influenza were searched in the CNKI, WanFang, VIP, SinoMed and PubMed. The quality of papers selected based on the inclusion criteria were assessed according to the Cochrane collaboration method and Meta-analysis was performed by using RevMan 5.3 software. A total of 8 articles were included, with a total sample size of 955 cases, including 478 cases in the treatment group, and 477 cases in the control group. In terms of the therapeutic effect, Lianhua Qingwen Capsules group was superior to the control group, ...  In terms of adverse reactions, the control group was superior to Lianhua Qingwen Capsules, ... Lianhua Qingwen Capsules has a better therapeutic effect on viral influenza, but the incidence of adverse reactions is high, and its safety must be taken seriously. Given the small number of documents included and the low quality, the efficacy and safety of Lianhua Qingwen Capsules shall be confirmed by more high-quality clinical studies.

But they keep telling us that SARS COV-2 is not the flu, and nothing like the flu! So why treat it as if it was the flu?



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Meanwhile, 7 weeks ago over in Singapore:

Yiling Pharmaceutical (002603.SZ) announced that it has obtained the product listing approval issued by the Health Sciences Authority (HSA) of Singapore which grants Lianhua Qingwen Capsule the initial sale authorization in the country. The approval certifies and registers Lianhua Qingwen - a traditional Chinese medicine commonly used for the prevention and treatment of viral influenza - under the category of Chinese Proprietary Medicines (CPM).

Developed under the guidance of collateral disease theory, the medicine is listed as the recommended medicine for the treatment of cold and influenza by China’s National Health Commission and National Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Composed of 13 Chinese herbs, the TCM has been found in the clinical research that it is effective in alleviating the influenza-induced symptoms like fever, cough and fugue.

Lianhua Qingwen also plays a pivotal role in the prevention and control of COVID-19 in China. Lianhua Qingwen was shown in a clinical trial to improve the recovery rate of patients infected with COVID-19. The latest research by State Key Laboratory of Respiratory Diseases, the First Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University has revealed that Lianhua Qingwen significantly inhibited the SARS-COV-2 replication, affected virus morphology and reduced the virus load in the infected cells in vitro.

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China TCM seems to have at least SIX herbal mixes that seem to help”

Traditional Chinese medicine has been playing a critical role in the prevention, treatment and rehabilitation of novel coronavirus pneumonia. Official figures showed that 91.6 percent of the patients in Hubei province, and 92.4 percent of patients nationwide have been treated with TCM.

Three formulas and three medicines have proved to be effective in treating the infection, according to the State Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Here is a list of them.

Remember when Hubei Provence was on the verge of annihilation one week, and seemingly perfectly cured the next? IIRC they claimed TCM as the reason, and the West ignored that. Barbaric folk remedies. Shamanism. Maybe somebody in the West out to do a study or three ...

Posted by Drew458     on 06/29/2020 at 11:56 AM   
Filed Under: • CHINA in the news • pandemic and epidemic diseases •  
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