Tu's Nobel not an achievement of the TCM

William Campbell, Satoshi Omura and Tu Youyou jointly won the 2015 Nobel Prize for medicine for their work against parasitic diseases. [Photo/CFP]

Chinese scientist Tu Youyou, together with Irish-born William Campbell and Japan's Satoshi Omura, won the 2015 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine. While it marks the international recognition of the country's scientific accomplishments, some people have wrongfully attributed Tu's feat to Traditional Chinese Medicine.

Admittedly, Tu won the prize mainly for her success in obtaining the pure substance of qinghaosu, later known as artemisinin (now a standard drug for malaria) from sweet wormwood, a traditional Chinese herbal medicine. But since its extraction method is poles apart from the typical TCM methodology of mixing various herbals, it can hardly be seen as an achievement of TCM.

In other words, TCM practitioners may still use dried sweet wormwood to treat malaria patients today, but few of them would consider using artemisinin.

However, TCM methodology certainly contributed to Tu's findings. Tu said she drew inspiration from the fourth-century Chinese pharmacist Ge Hong, who suggested in a book that drinking the juice obtained from sweet wormwood soaked in water can treat malaria.

"It occurred to me that high temperatures could have destroyed the (anti-malaria) activity," Tu told the Associated Press.

Before Tu, researchers had tried to extract something from the same herb to treat malaria, but failed since they had done that at high temperatures. Tu switched to using ether at lower temperatures and succeeded in extracting artemisinin.

Despite this, extracting artemisinin is purely modern pharmaceutical method and the product is no different from other chemical medicines in terms of production methodology.

Some people may have attempted to promote the role of TCM by attributing Tu's findings to it and portraying her winning of the Nobel Prize as a sign of its international recognition. While it is understandable, such a stance will only backfire and do harm to the healthy growth of TCM.

TCM is starkly different from modern medicine in terms of both analytical methodology and medicines used for treatment. Primarily, it aims to restore the inner physical balance of a patient instead of killing any specific viruses or illnesses (the modern way of treatment). For patients with the same illnesses, TCM practitioners may prescribe very different medicines because the causes, according to the TCM theories, may differ. Generally, a group of herbs are used in TCM treatment to bring out the combined force of the mixture.

For many trained physicians of modern medicine, such a methodology is hard to understand. They often shrug it as a proof of the irrationality and even absurdity of the TCM.

But for patients, it is always a treatment's effectiveness that matters the most. There have been reports and medical records of cases in which some experienced TCM practitioners have successfully cured some chronic diseases and even fatal diseases, such as cancer, that are seen as incurable using modern medicine.

How can TCM practitioners achieve this? It is a consensus among TCM practitioners that it is not because of any single magical herb, but because of the proper mixing of herbs in accordance with classical TCM theories.

There are many advocates in China for the modernization of the TCM. They argue that TCM should be reformed by using modern medicine methodology. The country has spent a lot of money on that drive in the past decades, which mainly involves the exploration and extraction of effective ingredients from the various herbs and the standardization of TCM prescriptions so that TCM can be utilized in a "scientific" way. The idea sounds attractive, but it has turned out to be largely ineffective in curing diseases.

If Tu's winning of the Nobel Prize is taken as an achievement of the TCM, as some have recklessly interpreted, it may do more harm than good to TCM, since there would be more people pushing for modernizing the TCM, possibly leading to the loss of its unique analytical and treatment methodologies, without which TCM would no longer be as effective in curing diseases.

The author is a senior writer with China Daily.

xinzhiming@chinadaily.com.cn