Ancient Wisdom
Chinese medicine is now entering the mainstream
By Dominic Cadden
(please note that this article is a reproduction of the original article on Sunday Telegraph, 21st September 2008 for the benefits of readers visiting our site as we are unable to locate the article on Sunday Telegraph’s website and believe it’s of great benefits to the readers)
As an overburdened health system struggles to cope, more Australians are turning to Chinese herbal medicine as a natural alternative. Now health authorities are seeking to bring standards and scientific evidence to this ancient traditional practice.
Dr Alan Bensoussan, director of the National Institute of Complementary Medicine, says: “It’s been the major form of health care for centuries in more than a quarter of the world.”
“In the last 60 years, it’s been used for both outpatients and inpatients in public hospitals in China, Korea and also Japan, where more than 200 Chinese herbal formulations are on the equivalent of the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.”
The entire diagnostic process of Chinese traditional medicine, which aims to achieve balance in the body, differs from that of western medicine.
“The Chinese have linked particular signs together, connecting not only physical symptoms, such as the colour of the tongue and the quality of the pulse on the wrist, but also their predominant emotions, to make a diagnosis,” Dr. Bensoussan says.
When drugs don’t work
Marketing manager Amelia Zaina, 37, from Sydney, says: “A couple of years ago I had pneumonia and very bad asthma, and I continued to get chest infections at the drop of a hat.” She was using Bricanyl and Ventolin inhalers for asthma for the first time in her life, and antibiotics failed to rectify the chest infections or strengthen her immune system. After her sixth chest infection in a year, Zaina sought another option. A GP who also practised Chinese herbal medicine put her on a seven-day course of herbal medicine-a formulation of herbs in pellets to swallow three times a day. After a week her respiratory system had recovered and she no longer needed her inhalers. She hasn’t has another chest infection in more than a year.
“Now I would always seek an alternative to drug therapy,” Zaina says, “When I’m pumping all these drugs into my body, I wonder what all the chemicals are doing inside me if they’re not fixing the problem. Even when drug-based therapy works, I feel it just provides a short-term fix rather than getting to the root of why your body is reaching the way it is.”
Zaina returned to the same Chinese herbalist months later because she’d seen a doctor about a stress rash and cortisone creams hadn’t helped. The Chinese alternative was honeysuckle and forsythia, which came in granules to dissolve in hot water and drink when the liquid cooled. The rash cleared up within four days.
“He said the rash came because I was still weakened by the pneumonia, so internally, my body wasn’t balanced. That made me have a lot of sensitivities, even towards things such as a moisturiser which I might have been using for years.”
The holistic approach
The more holistic and individual approach of Chinese medicine may help explain why it works so well for some chronic and recurring conditions.
Dr Bensoussan says that in western medicine we’re used to a clear diagnosis of the disease and usually one of two or three options for pharmaceutical treatment. “And if that one option seems to work, then you stick to that one drug,” he says, “But in Chinese herbal medicine there’s often some tweaking and changing of the formulation as the patient responds.”
Variables such as these make scientific testing on Chinese herbal medicine, as it is actually practiced, more challenging. For Medicine Research (CompleMED) at the University of Western Sydney is working on making a database that outlines the adverse effects of Chinese herbs and interactions with western medicines so it can provide a toxicity grading for each herb. This gets complicated, as Chinese herbal medicines are usually combinations of four to 20 herbs, with small amounts of several bioactive ingredients working in synergy.
“So part of the defence is that where there might be a small amount of a toxic ingredient, it’s actually detoxified by other herbs in the formula,” Dr. Bensoussan says.
Several other studies have also looked at the potential for adverse interactions between Western drugs (Particularly Warfarin, an anti-coagulant for the blood) and Chinese herbs. This has become a concern, as a national survey by the RMIT Chinese Medicine Research Group showed that 35 per cent of people take Chinese herbs in combination with pharmaceutical drugs, while Health Victoria reports that 63 per cent of people using some kind of Chinese medicine had first seen a GP for their condition.
Kwan Chung, 49, says: “If I get sick, the first thing I do is go to the local medical doctor. But if their medicine has no effect, I turn to Chinese herbal medicine.” Chung, a sales rep from Sylvania in Sydney, used to get the flu every winter, despite being vaccinated, and antibiotics didn’t work ever after a week. He found Chinese herbs could cure his flu after two doses. He now takes a course of Chinese herbal medicine for his general wellbeing twice a month and no longer gets the flu.
“For me, it’s a cultural thing. I’m used to the Chinese philosophy. I think other people are more open to Chinese medicine now, but it comes down to convenience. You may have to make a trip a find a Chinese herbalist, and then you often have to boil up the herbs into a soup. So it’s always easier to use a GP who’s usually just around the corner, and western medicine acts very quickly when it works. Chinese medicine tends to work more slowly, but it can be better in the long term.”
Proof in numbers
So far, Victoria is the only state to regulate Chinese medicine, although the process has begun in NSW and Western Australia. In Victoria, practitioners must be registered through the Chinese Medicine Registration Board (the first one established outside China) and the State Government limits the use of the more toxic, but clinically important, herbs to practitioners who have the appropriate level of training.
It’s difficult to say whether it’s the chicken or the egg, but Victoria has significantly higher rate of people using Chinese medicine than other states, and the number of registered Chinese herbal practitioners has more than doubled to 631 between 2001 and 2007.
Dr Charlie Xue, director the RMIT Chinese Medicine Research Group, says: “In 2005 we conducted a survey that showed 40 per cent of Australians taking Chinese herbal medicine used it for their general health.” Of the rest, herbs were most commonly used for colds and flu, low energy, respiratory disorders (for example, hayfever and asthma) and digestive disorders such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).
“Now the governments and health authorities are saying: ‘Show me the evidence,’” Dr Xue says. Both state and federal governments are now funding clinical trials and other evaluations of Chinese herbal therapy. Dr Bensoussan points to positive results in several international studies that have looked at the use of Chinese herbal medicine to threat conditions such as primary dysmenorrhoea, endometriosis and IBS-all of which often prove problematic to cure in Western medicine. “There are also good leads into the treatment of dementia, and hawthorn has been demonstrated to be effective for congestive cardiac failure,” he says.
For many people who have suffered long term with these conditions, the future of their health may lay in the ways of the past.
East vs West
Here’s an example that demonstrates the different diagnostic approaches of Chinese and Western medicine:
- Six patients have stomach pain. A western doctor asks about the location and type of pain and other associated symptoms such as bleeding. He sends them off for an endoscopy, which shows all six have peptic ulcers. Regardless of sex, age and emotional state, all six are treated the same way.
- A Chinese traditional medicine practitioner examines the same patients. He takes into account differences in build, the quality of their pulse, complexion, tongue colour, predominant moods and sleeping patterns, among other things. Each patient is diagnosed with a different root cause for their ulcer, and each receives a different treatment (none of it is invasive) based on their unique clinical picture.
The Chinese way
- Chinese herbal medicine uses formulations of herbs, often supplied in dried form to be boiled up. Sometimes herbs may also be ground up into a powder, which is traditionally bound with honey to form pills. If you are taking Chinese herbs and pharmaceutical drugs at the same time, inform your doctor and herbalist. In Victoria you can find a practitioner at www.cmrb.vic.gov.au. Elsewhere, visit www.acupuncture.org.au.
