Over the months I've showed in great depths the corruption, the lies, the history, politics, flawed scientific practices, bias, theft and more associated with Traditional Chinese Medicine, let alone the actual nonsensical logic behind the wild, unsubstantiated claims leading to the deaths and extinction of endangered species around the world.

But only lightly have I expressed the dangers to people, especially pregnancy women. So here I will archive a few examples and the reason why they matter to everybody - Worldwide.

Wu Xiaoliang

One wintery morning in China, a middle aged farmer had a headache. He went to the doctors and got two injections (?). Later on about noon time, he died, leaving his 17 year old daughter alone.

The cause of death was apparently an allergic reaction to the drugs he was injected with. Now, I don't dismiss that this could happen to anybody, with scientific medicine or otherwise. The real problem here lies in what the medicine actually was; we don't know.

The injections were a concoction of possibly hundreds of extracts from random 'traditional' herbs. It was impossible to determine what was what, and which was deadly to Mr. Wu.

This is not entirely unique. Adverse reactions and deaths from traditional injections doubled over 5 years, reaching 133,000 (recorded) incidents in 2016. This is largely going to be a result of a complete lack of regulation, and many of the hundreds of injecting combinations going to market without any human trials whatsoever. Should individual herbs be tested, the mixture of herbs is a generally arbitrary creation gone untested, something created by the whim of the doctor at the time; 'personalised medicine'.

Injecting herbs is a relatively new phenomenon, a result of the demand of fast and active results in a busy, impatient world. So many Chinese drug making companies such as China Shineway Pharmaceutical Group and Guangxi Wuzhou Zhongheng Group simply take the concept of oral medicine, grind and liquify it into an injectable form. This bypasses the protective routine the body could otherwise go through when things are taken orally, as the liquid drug goes straight into the bloodstream and into your brain or whatever. Side effects, as a result, are typically much stronger.

The above company, Shineway, profits substantially from injections alone; about $160 million each year. With just two or three major companies combined, this industry has a value of around $10 billion. Expand that to all companies globally, and you're looking at about $121 billion per year; 30 times that of 20 years ago...

...It's on the rise

Wu Xiaoliang was just one anecdotal victim. But he wasn't the only one, and he won't be the last until proper regulations are installed and enforced. Who knows when that'll be.

Xu Ting

This Chinese actress raises another issue aside from the actual contents itself; people's attitude and belief.

With the often - and falsely - touted '5,000 years of history' backing up traditional medicine, and a constant global propaganda campaign to demonstrate its benefits over real medicine, and people's completely absurd distrust of 'big pharma', all put together, and you get completely unnecessary deaths such as this.

Xu Ting had cancer. I've already talked about how TCM claims to have an alarmingly high success rate with cancer, often along the lines of 90% despite it actually being closer to 0%. But percentages are just for evil 'intellects' and 'snobs' so let's ignore those.

Instead, Xu went with cupping, acupuncture, and skin scraping. That'll do the trick!

She's now dead. Aged 26.

Her reasoning was that the treatment for her Lymphoma was scary old Chemotherapy, and she figured it would be far too painful. She simply wanted to enjoy every day happily. Her words, not mine. She said 'I don't want chemotherapy to torture me until I have no beauty or talent left'.

So instead, she went with this:

_{Her social media update of cupping, or bloodletting, as it is known in medieval times}

_{Gua Sha. Scraping the skin off. A more painful variant of bloodletting}

_{Kinda like giving yourself multiple giant love bites, but with a scraping knife}

I'm sure that was a relief. Well it is now she's dead if nothing else.

By the time she and her family decided this wasn't working - and blamed it on a fraudulent doctor rather than the practice itself, obviously - they gave in and went for chemo... a long time after it was too late. Her immune system was too weak by this point and only 2 months after her diagnosis, her body gave up.

This news did hit several headlines and sparked a debate on TCM - which is something. Perhaps her death may not be in vain. But it probably will. In response to the backlash on medicine, the Beijing Evening News wrote:

Some people say that traditional Chinese medicine can’t cure cancer, so therefore traditional Chinese medicine is a sham. This kind of logic is ridiculous. There are many cancer patients who still pass away after receiving chemotherapy. Will these same people also say that western medicine is a sham?

You raise a good point, Evening news. Perhaps we should look at the evidence to find the best path forward? I wonder which would come out on top...

My point here is that TCM is growing in popularity, right alongside people's unfounded skepticism of real medicine. This is just a single result of dozens of incidents of deaths I used to see scrolling through my facebook page with Americans and Chinese alike choosing to die, or for their children to die, on whacky, unscientific beliefs such as TCM. And don't think there's some safe divide between you and China's deadly, unregulated source of health:

Yu-Ping Xie

_{Harmless enough, right?}

Ms. Yu was residing in San Francisco and was enjoying a nice cuppa of herbal tea. Then she died.

Turns out the Sun Wing Wo Trading Company making the tea that Ms. Yu purchased in China Town was pretty poisonous. Incidentally another man was hospitalised from the same company just a month or so earlier.

Now, this could have been a bad batch, an unfortunate one-off safety incident right? But let's be honest, it wasn't.

The investigation found aconite in the tea mix, something I explain in this article which is a deadly plant toxin frequently used in Chinese medicine. Aconite is said to work as a blood coagulant, an anti-inflammatory, an anti-cancer remedy, and a tumour and wound healer. I think they forgot 'life liberator' in the description. You'll be pleased to know there is no known method to counteract poisoning from this deadly plant. Once enough is in you, you're done for.

Normally, the fact that the plant is nicknamed 'The queen of poisons' would be a red flag, but apparently not. Again, no regulation was there to prevent this until after the fact, and no regulation was there to properly prepare the inevitably useless drug to be at least benign to begin with. It just isn't needed because it doesn't officially class as medicine.

Change of Law

So, after all this controversy and the climbing popularity of TCM, the Chinese Communist party FINALLY decided to step in and... wait, what?

In mid 2017, a legislation was passed to raise the status of Traditional Medicine.

I'll let that sink in a second.

Yes, the legislation:

requires local governments to launch TCM institutions in all medical centers, increasing funding for its development, and widening the scale of TCM education.

Well isn't that nice. Apparently, TCM isn't popular enough! Apparently, though TCM has been on the rise globally, it's actually been on the decline in China, and heaven forbid anything Chinese go out of fashion.

Sigh.

Final Thoughts

These are just some examples of the inherently problematic nature of Traditional medicinal practices. But there's so much more. For example, because it's 'traditional' and 'historical' and 'cultural', people who are not doctors are led to believe they can simply go outside and pick some plants, slaughter some animals, make up some story that seems to make sense on the surface and then turn it into an alternative to reality.

Case in point: A video was just released showing a mother feeding her baby tadpoles, under the impression that it will heal the baby. You can watch it here. Little does she know that tadpoles are often riddled with infection-inducing parasites. In fact, a recent study in the mother's area of Henan showed about 12% of tadpoles to be infected with something that could give humans sparganosis, an infection that can cause a whole array of complex symptoms, including seizures.

But hey, who needs statistics?

This is, again, not unique to this mother. There has even been a medical report released warning about this exact and growing practice.

Everywhere I look when it comes to TCM, I get nothing but warning sirens. It's likely that for most people, you either get no effect at all or perhaps with some more simple, well known medicines, a slight relief from a stomach ache or something. But for many, extreme sickness or death lies ahead; especially if you're a donkey, since Millions of donkeys get beaten to death with hammers to make the medicine we humans enjoy. A useless fake medicine I've already covered that can be potentially dangerous to pregnant women. No wonder African nations banned the import of donkeys to China.

So if you get involved with TCM, you are putting yourself at risk of causing either personal health problems, somebody else's health problems, or be directly responsible for the bludgeoning of a 5 month old donkey. But you might feel it improves your headache if you're lucky and the placebo effect kicks in for you.

Something to think about.

Images Public Domain or shared freely on Social Media

Other references: Law of the People's Republic of China on Traditional Chinese Medicine | Deadly Aconite | Sparganosis | My article on Cupping | My article on the History of TCM

All other information comes from research from previous articles written by me