Putting traditional Chinese medicine to the test

Putting traditional Chinese medicine to the test

For traditional Chinese medicine to gain legitimacy, it must be held to the same rigorous standards.

Toad skin and turtle shells aren’t the cures most Americans turn to when they learn they’ve developed cancer. But in China, the market for traditional remedies like these grew 35 percent last year, twice as fast as the overall anti-cancer market. Though the effectiveness of these treatments is unproven, Western doctors, elite medical institutions and pharmaceutical companies are starting to put them to the scientific test.

At first glance, the gap between dried centipede (a traditional Chinese anti-cancer drug) and conventional medicine seems a wide one. But Westerners have adopted Chinese medical practice before. In 1971, New York Times editor and columnist James Reston wrote about his experience with acupuncture after an emergency appendectomy at Beijing's Anti-Imperialist Hospital. It was the first time that many Americans had ever heard of the procedure, and is widely acknowledged to have done much to legitimize it in the eyes of patients, medical professionals and even insurance companies.

But acupuncture, even if badly administered, is unlikely to pinprick a patient to injury or death. The same cannot be said for some of the drugs associated with traditional Chinese medicine, widely known as TCM. TCM remains very much a craft, largely unregulated and barely vetted by science. Tragic consequences are well documented. A 2013 study of acute liver failure in China found that 17 percent of reported cases were caused by herbal remedies, while a 2014 study found that 42.5 percent of all drug-induced liver failure in China was caused by TCM.

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