chinese studies

[Guest guest]

The success rate in chinese studies is often reported as a combination

of those who were markedly improved and those who showed any

improvement at all. However, by western criteria, it would often be

judged that only those who showed marked improvement should be

considered true successes. Many western drugs control various symptoms

of disease. Most chinese studies I have seen use relief from symptoms

without any changes in the pathophysiology as the criteria for saying

the patient improved. However mild improvement is often placebo and if

the study is not placebo controlled, you just need to throw out that

group as a success. There is also rarely proper long term followup

reported. Just because a patient has reduced inflammation for 18

months while on decoctions every day for RA does not mean they are

still well 3 months after discontinuing herbs. In my experience, this

is rarely the case. Though combined therapy with herbs, drugs and

western supps does promote remission, CM alone rarely does. I am

speaking here from feedback and observations from hundreds of px over

18 years, not just my practice. WM is pretty good a controlling sx, so

sx relief alone is not a basis for exalted claims about CM. When

evaluating studies from China, I tend to ignore all but the markedly

improved groups . Unlike the total 60-80% success rates reported for

many organic chronic illnesses, the markedly improved group is usually

more like 10-20%. The fact that 10-20% of RA or parkinsons patients

can get marked improvement from TCM is still worth reporting, but

clearly the vast majority do not get adequate relief from TCM for most

organic chronic illnesses. Perhaps its the style of research (often

allopathic). But even studies where TCM pattern dx is used show no

significantly better results. TCM seems to be only useful for organic

chronic illnesses as a complement or adjunct to WM in most cases.

This is just as well as most patients are on drugs and will not stop

taking them, but the problem is that we are unable to practice combined

drug/herb therapy in the west unless we have an MDs cooperation. I

thus no longer advocate research into the solo TCM treatment of organic

chronic illnesses. All such research should be integrative or we

should prepare ourselves for a string of discrediting failures when

gold standard research criteria are applied.

 

 

 

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