Trying to be a proper skeptic and a reader of Skeptical Inquirer, it’s natural for me to wonder at a TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) remedy for Covid-19, but others might not. I hadn’t heard of any, much to my surprise, until I ran across this post tonight by Dutch microbiologist and science integrity consultant Elisabeth Bik on Science Integrity Digest via Retraction Watch:
The recent COVID-19 outbreak has led to an enormous amount of preprints and rapidly-approved papers of variable quality. A recently published paper in Pharmacological Research called “Traditional Chinese Medicine for COVID-19 Treatment” caught my eye. The title suggested that Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) could be used to treat patients that had fallen ill with the viral disease, but a quick read showed that the paper promised much more than it delivered. Here is a critical review.
The paper starts off with a description of the COVID-19 outbreak and how Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) might bring new hope to treat the disease. It describes the successful treatment of a COVID-19 patient with plant-based mixture called qingfei paidu decoction (QPD). At first glance, this might be a welcome alternative treatment for a novel disease that is quickly growing to be a pandemic, and for which there are no good treatments or vaccines available. But with great claims, we need to see great data, and this is where the paper does not deliver at all.
Want more technical information? Visit Bik’s blog post at the link above. The executive summary is that the paper does not use a proper technique for evaluating the medicine under evaluation, is terribly vague when it should be precise, and a few other errors.
Naturally, many people think there’s a lot of money to be made from a cure, although governments from here to Monte Carlo might declare such a cure to be a public good and pay the inventor enough to cover costs – or make them rich, because who knows how governments would operate these days if presented with such a situation.
But what many don’t realize is that there’s a lot of money to be made with fake cures and vaccines. Just like fly-by-night contractors, dishonest medicine vendors will sell you their verified-by-God cure and then disappear, or refuse to return your money – if, in fact, you do survive long enough to file a complaint in court. See this post on disgraced Evangelical preacher Jimmy Baker.
So if you hear of some TCM, complementary, or other less-than-evidence based cure for COVID-19 that doesn’t really have a good stamp of approval from an accepted authority on it, skip it.
