China's traditional medicine under attack by Western ways

XIKOU, China -- The fur is flying, not to mention the acupuncture needles, the herbs, and the $15,000-a-pound bull gallstones.

China's ancient healing arts, as integral to the national identity as the Great Wall or steamed dumplings, have become embroiled in the country's struggle to balance tradition and modernity.

A relatively obscure professor at a regional university kicked off the controversy in October with an online petition calling for traditional medicine to be stripped from the Chinese constitution. It has a protected status in China that, in theory, guarantees it equal footing with its Western counterpart.

Zhang Gongyao and other critics have blasted Chinese medicine as an often ineffective, even dangerous, derivative of witchcraft that relies on untested concoctions and obscure ingredients to trick patients, and then employs a host of excuses if the treatment does not work.

For adherents of the 3,000-year-old system, this borders on heresy.

The Health Ministry labeled Zhang's ideas as "ignorant of history," and traditionalists have called the skeptics traitors bent on "murdering" Chinese culture.

Ironically, the firestorm dovetails with a growing embrace of Chinese medicine abroad as an antidote to the perceived soulless, money-obsessed nature of Western health care.

On a trip to China in mid- December, the US Health and Human Services secretary, Mike Leavitt, said the two countries planned to trade lessons on how to integrate Western and Chinese medicine.

"It's an area of interest for China and the US," he said.

Many Australians, Europeans, and Americans see limitations in advanced science, said Rey Tiquia, a specialist in Chinese traditional medicine based in Australia, even as more Chinese begin to view their traditions as old-fashioned.

"For Chinese," he said, "it's still the lure of something new and shiny, like riding a car rather than a bicycle."

Since 1949, the number of traditional doctors trained in China has fallen by almost half, to 270,000, while the number of Western-trained doctors has jumped twentyfold, to more than 1.7 million.

Criticism that traditional medicine is not scientific dates back centuries.

But Zhang's remedies -- an end to national insurance coverage for traditional medicine, rigorous scientific standards, and obligatory Western training for traditional doctors -- have hit a nerve at a time when adherents of traditional Chinese medicine are increasingly on the defensive.

At Beijing's prestigious Xiehe Hospital, cardiology, gynecology, internal medicine, and other Western specialties are housed in a new 6-story building filled with shiny equipment, well-maintained halls, and renovated toilets.

The traditional medicine department is relegated to eight consulting rooms and a therapeutic facility in an outer building with peeling green paint, water-stained walls, and a foul smell emanating from a dimly lighted toilet.

Some blame skewed financial incentives and a government that is forgetting its roots.

"The Health Ministry is actually the Ministry of Western Health," said Lin Zhongpeng, a researcher with the Beijing Tianren Yiyi Traditional Medicine Institute. "It's also shocking that doctors get 15 percent kickbacks selling Western drugs."

Traditional remedies tend to be less expensive than Western ones. At Tongrentang traditional pharmacy and clinic along Dashila alley in Beijing, a dozen people waited for football-sized bags of herbs for a few dollars each.

But there are more expensive exceptions.

In glass cases, beneath an ad touting an herbal tonic for avian flu, shelves brimmed with dried snakes, sea horses, ground-up pearls, and deer-horn powder, used for ailments such as rheumatism, paralysis, asthma, epilepsy, gastritis, and acute infantile convulsions.

"The most expensive would be bull gallstones," a clerk said, pointing at a yellowish shrink-wrapped object the size of a nickel, used for fevers and inflammation.

In an adjoining building, a third-generation traditional doctor, Guan Qingwei, examined several patients, prescribing different herbal combinations for insomnia, high-blood pressure, and rashes.

Unlike Western medicine, which focuses on the disease, traditional medicine takes a holistic approach, he said.

Adherents of "ZangXiang," one of the discipline's fundamental tenets, believe the body gives external clues to the imbalance of internal organs, which can be rectified with herbs and acupuncture.

Both systems have their strengths, Guan said, but judging traditional medicine according to Western scientific theory and using "double-blind" tests on herbal remedies is inappropriate.

"Not only is it unfair, it's laughable," he said. "It's like judging hamburgers based on the taste of dumplings."

Although Chinese schools pump out thousands of traditional medicine graduates each year, nearly half never practice -- they chose the specialty because other departments were full.

A Chinese government delegation on a recent visit to California said the United States could surpass China soon as the best place to learn traditional medicine, said Lixin Huang, president of the American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine in San Francisco, the nation's oldest such graduate program.

A common criticism of Chinese medicine involves its often unregulated ingredients.

"Many herbal medicines considered innocuous are actually very toxic," said Fang Zhouzi, a biochemist, columnist, and founder of a website that targets academic fraud. "But practitioners and proponents cover this up using various excuses."

The Food and Drug Administration banned products marketed as Chinese herbal medicine during the 1970s and 1980s after they were implicated in several deaths. In 2004, the FDA issued a ban on the herb ephedra after it was linked to heart attacks and strokes.

Chinese traditional specialists have attributed this to misuse. They point to "guan mu tong," which has been used for centuries to treat urinary-tract infections. Problems surfaced only when Westerners used it incorrectly for weight loss, they say.

Nor are Western drugs free of powerful side effects, others counter.

"Why don't people talk about Western medicines that cause problems?" said Zheng Jinsheng, a professor at the Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences in Beijing, who thinks both disciplines have their place. "Why is traditional medicine always blamed?"