Traditional Chinese Medicine May Perform Better than ...

"Traditional Chinese Medicine May Perform Better than Interferon or Lamivudine for Chronic Hepatitis B"
I came across this http://www.hivandhepatitis.com/hep_b/news/2010/0406_2010_a.html today.
This might please cajim :-).

Speaking for myself: Entecavir is working well for me (no seroconversion, but UND VL). So I can afford to wait longer until they have more data to present. Not that I like taking a completely passive approach to this: if they had a trial in my town, I would enroll.

[cajim]

I thank you for alerting me to that research which is a good work on a difficult comparison exactly because the different frameworks and different assumptions that different schools of medicine take.

Just to mention a few: a=Chinese Medicine; b=Western Medicine.

1a.  The focus is on the patient: by keeping the patient's body balanced, the diseases will leave and cannot harm.
1b.  The focus is on the disease: the assumption is that when the disease is killed or removed, the body will be well.

2a.  Each patient is different and a good treatment needs to adapt to that patient.
2b.  Multi-center trials, double-blindness are musts to prove the validity of a treatment.  Individual cases of successes or failures don't prove anything.

3a.  The closer to nature the healthy one can be.  That is why when one is ill, one first tries to cure by food, then by massage etc., then by acupuncture etc., then by alcohol, and only lastly when the previous four all fail does one resort to drugs.
3b.  The closer to the laboratory the more convincing because science demands exactness and duplicability and leaves nothing to wishywashyness.

...

I guess we patients just want to get cured.  Whatever works works.  As for HBV, Western Medicine emphasizes control of virus replication and Chinese Medicine emphasizes helping the body coexist with the virus.  The former thinks it is a success when the disease progression is slowed down or halted while the latter thinks it is a success when the body lives its natural life, with or without the virus.

ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME.

[Sharp7]

One odd thing I noticed when I read the actual paper: they compared TCM with IFN, and not peginterferon. I imagine that the cost of peginterferon is why "in mainland China, IFN and LAM are currently the most commonly used western remedies"

[cajim]

You are absolutely right: the Chinese versions of IFN and LAM are more affordable to the majority of HBVers there and western-made IFN and LAM and even Chinese versions of peginterferon can be beyond their affordability.