LAist is in Los Angeles
Editor’s Note: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration You have not approved the products discussed in this article for the prevention or remedy of COVID-19. KPCC / LAist is a separate source of information; this article does not provide any medical recommendations or endorse products of any kind.
On April 11, while the coronavirus pandemic was in full swing, Sinong Lin won a package at his apartment in Chinatown, Los Angeles. Sent through his circle of relatives to China, it contained 50 small boxes of Lianhua Qingwen pills, a Chinese herb commonly used to relieve fever and other flu symptoms.
Lin soon won another shipment from his family; this time it was a Chinese herb called Qishen Gubiao Keli, which is combined with hot water to supposedly save coVID-19. All of these herbal remedies had been through the Medical Products Administration of Jiangsu Province, a local company equivalent to a state medical branch in the United States.
Having experienced SARS and MERS in China, the 30-year-old USC student and her husband knew how devastating COVID-19 can become. Like many angels, adding many Chinese they know, Lin and her husband supplied food, stayed in the house as much as they could, wore an outdoor mask, and disinfected everything in the days leading up to the order to stay in the city.
The only elements that gave the impression that they were missing from a pandemic survival regimen were Western over-the-counter medicines, such as Tylenol and ibuprofen. The concept of buying them, he told me, never crossed his mind.
“If there is a symptom, the first idea is to drink the Qishen Gubiao Keli drink for a day and then practice the body condition,” Lin said in Mandarin. “I didn’t even think about taking American drugs.”
Lin is far from alone. She had won those packages from China because medicinal herbs were already rare in Los Angeles, and they still are. As several Chinese herbalists have told me, a document published through the Chinese government in June, which claimed that 92% of COVID-19 cases in China had been effectively treated with Chinese herbal preparations, was followed through a call for those remedies in Southern California.
“The Chinese depend on Chinese medicine,” Wen Yang Lu said, speaking in Mandarin as he stood behind the Chinese Herbal Tang counter in Monterey Park. “There are thousands of years of history of using Chinese herbal medicine, so they perceive how it works and accept it as true. If it’s not for serious illness, they prefer to move on to Chinese herbalists.”
Lu’s small herb shop in Monterey Park is in a hurry with plenty of other outlets promoting everything from handbags to baby products and alcohol.
Since the COVID-19 outbreak in March, Lu says the number of customers who cure colds and fever has increased from one or two a day to 20. They come for herbs that are intended to improve immunity or treat symptoms such as fever. , sore throat, headache and shortness of breath.
“Due to the severity of the virus, many restaurants have been closed and many employees have returned to Monterey Park from other states,” Lu said. He said he follows the prescription rules of the prestigious Chinese medical hospital in Shanxi province.
During rush hour, Lu said he had between six and ten consumers queuing. The store door is locked for social estrangement, and Lu wears blue latex gloves and a surgical mask. Spray an herbal medicine plastic bag with Lysol before handing it over to a customer, then disinfects the dollar bills.
He told me that consumers buy wholesale and come out with five or ten boxes of their favorite remedies. Since April, Lu estimates that he has sold nearly three times the amount of Lianhua Qingwen pills than he would usually do in a year. It also has out-of-state clients, and one in New York ordered 120 pounds of “antiviral herbs.”
Similar Chinese drugs (banlangen, forsythia, dried ginger) fly off the shelves. Lu told me that he stored at least a hundred pounds of each of them in early April, he was exhausted in June.
As an increase is called for, charges increase. In Lu’s store, the cost of honeysuckle flower, an herb used for bloodless symptoms, is higher than $20 per pound at $50, or even $60 per pound. “I’ve sold more than two hundred books in the last 3 months,” Lu said. He sells 20 books a year.
Lu said he makes more money than usual because of the accumulation of orders, but not much more. Wholesale prices have also gone up.
Despite the skepticism of medicinal herbs and classical Chinese medicine, many other people, native and foreign-born, depend on them.
Lilly Chiu Pelletier, a 49-year-old Chinese-American resident of Manhattan Beach, is one of them. On March 30, shortly after her twins’ seventh birthday, she had a fever. When she tested positive for COVID-19, Pelletier quarantined her in a room. Her husband left the food at the door.
“Now I know what he looks like a criminal, ” said Pelletier laughing.
His symptoms got worse. “I couldn’t breathe, ” he said. “I felt like [underwater].”
After calling an ambulance and the paramedics who showed up dissuaded her from moving to the hospital, Pelletier felt helpless and frightened. If she wanted to go to the hospital, her husband, who has asthma, would have to take her there and her young daughters would be left alone in the house.
Pelletier said Tylenol had helped her with fever, but that symptoms (diarrhoea, fatigue, aches) persisted.
Desperate, she turned to Xiaoxiong Shen, an acupuncturist and practitioner of classical Chinese in Gardena.
Get our newsletters with the latest news about COVID-19 and other local headlines.
Shen sent him a week-long dose of formula-based herbs through Chinese protocol to diagnose and treat COVID-19 (test edition 7). After taking them for a few days, Pelletier said he had started to recover. After a week, he said, the other symptoms disappeared. You can’t be sure, but she said, “I think the grass helped.”
Outside the Chinese community, other people also seek herbal remedies. Among them is Monzerratt Patino, 28, a resident of South Gate.
Patiño is a youth counselor at a psychiatric hospital in Torrance. He said that by early June, seven patients and 28 of his colleagues had tested positive for COVID-19. She’s one of them.
She was discouraged by her doctor’s suggestion of “taking Tylenol and not taking ibuprofen,” so she turned to a friend who is reading herbal medicine at Santa Monica’s Faculty of Traditional Oriental Medicine. He put her in touch with a professor, Changqing Yang, who also runs an acupuncture clinic.
Patiño had never tried classical Chinese medicine before, but her friends had done it, so she was ready. “I felt motivated and convinced that it would help,” she said.
Yang sent him a formula of herbs, adding Chai Hu and Huang Qin, to ease his sore throat and aches. He did not follow his doctor’s orders to take Tylenol, he said, because he prefers not to take prescription medications and had heard combined reports on his effectiveness in treating COVID-19 symptoms.
“After the first night of tea, my sore throat was gone; the aches and pains were subsiding,” Patiño said.
Yang stated that the Chinese herbs he had prescribed followed a table of herbal formulas for COVID-19 compiled through two experts in classical Chinese medicine and were in formulas used at Hubei Provincial Hospital and Wuhan Union Hospital.
“In China, many of the doctors in the group who are engaged in herbal medicine have played a role,” Yang said. “They almost erased all moderate to mild [COVID-19] cases.”
Yang said he hopes other people in the U.S. can use herbal remedies to treat COVID-19, but: “The very complicated barrier is that biochemistry researchers don’t do it in the theories of classical Chinese medicine.”
Despite the steady expansion of its popularity in recent decades and some studies pointing to its effectiveness, classical Chinese medicine is widely accepted in the United States.
Robert Newman, dean of clinical education at Emperor’s College, recalls how Chinese medicine was perceived in the late 1980s, when he began reading it in San Francisco.
“All press articles, reports or interviews with future experts were negative about Eastern medicine,” Newman said. “There was a great bias opposed to that.”
Attitudes began to be replaced in the 1990s, with acupuncture as a more common remedy for pain relief.
In 1993, the New England Journal of Medicine published a report of a significant number of Americans using natural and choice remedies. Four years later, the National Institute of Health accepted studies suggesting the effectiveness of acupuncture in alleviating nausea and vomiting in adults after surgery or chemotherapy, and as a complementary remedy in cases such as addiction and post-stroke rehabilitation.
Today, 47 states have laws regulating acupuncture and there are more than 35,000 state-approved doctors in the United States. In 2012, the National Institutes of Health reported that a quarter of Americans who use acupuncture may qualify their insurance for it.
However, acceptance of Chinese medicine is preventable there. Herbs like banlangen and forsythia were primarily nutritional supplements, and until now, the FDA has only approved two herbal medications as prescription drugs: a green tea extract used to treat genital warts and an extract from Drago’s Blood, an herb. used to treat HIV and AIDS-associated diarrhoea.
“Most people in this country are simply conveying the concept that Chinese medicine is acupuncture and that acupuncture is pain control,” said Dr. Ka-Kit Hui, director of UCLA’s East-West Medicine Center at David Geffen School of Medicine. “Many other people don’t realize that Chinese herbal medicine can be used to treat infections [like SARS].”
In early March, Hui proposed that the UCLA School of Medicine identify an herbal medicine trial for patients with COVID-19. The first step is to download FDA approval. This is a complicated procedure because classic Chinese medicinal herbs are not approved by the FDA and Western medical journals have not published any knowledge about Chinese herbs and coVID-19 remedy. According to Hui, his proposal is still being considered through the FDA’s Institutional Review Committee.
For Shen, a Gardena acupuncturist, the FDA’s lack of approval has pros and cons. “[Medical plants] are readily available to U.S. citizens who are in them,” Shen told me in Mandarin. “However, the problem is that they cannot be considered a remedy for any disease.”
As for its effectiveness in treating COVID-19 symptoms, Shen said: “It is not clinical to claim that Chinese herbal medicines are a remedy for COVID-19, but it is also undeniable that they are useful for improving symptoms. “
Newman, of Imperial’s College, added: “There is fear about how it works and how and how it is effective. [The FDA] relies heavily on double-blind studies,” and such studies are rare.
Licensed doctors cannot prescribe classic Chinese herbs because almost all of those remedies are not FDA approved and would possibly provide protection issues.
In 1993, after taking a specific logo of Chinese herbal supplements for weight loss imported from Hong Kong, 105 Belgians developed kidney disease and immediate renal failure. Researchers attributed the challenge to a substance called aristolochy acid, which can be extracted from herbs in the aristoloche family.
Soon, herbs containing aristolochic acid were banned in the United States, Canada, Australia and many European countries. A ban in China implemented in the early 2000s.
While the FDA’s protection problems and obstacles have created barriers to classical Chinese medicine in the United States, opposition from some professionals is more deeply entrenched. “Asians are culturally different in their lifestyle, in the formula of trust, etc.,” Hui said. “That’s why it was very difficult for a Western medical giant to allow the use of Chinese medicine, because it was an idea that it was chatter.”
Aside from general skepticism, Hui said, profit margins are as high for herbal remedies as for Western pharmaceuticals, many of which are patented and sold at a higher price. Chinese medicine, Hui said, “is smart to make money.”
Los Angeles County has recorded nearly a quarter of a million cases of COVID-19 and more than 5,000 deaths from the virus, according to the most recent knowledge of the Department of Public Health. In the San Gabriel Valley, where the population of cities such as Monterey Park and San Gabriel is almost part Chinese or Chinese-American, rates of coronavirus infection and hospitalization remain relatively low.
Patrick Petre, executive director of Garfield Medical Center in Monterey Park, told me that COVID-19 cases at his hospital were consistently low compared to other services in Los Angeles. The number of COVID-19 patients in the hospital peaked at 40 in July when infections increase in the county. As of August 18, the hospital had 15 patients with COVID-19 and that number is shrinking every day, according to John Zhuo, Garfield’s senior managing director.
“When the COVID crisis in early March, we were ready for a push because Monterey Park is obviously an Asian network with many other people coming and going into China,” Petre said in early June. “We expected the worst. Here we are, three and a half months later, we had several patients with COVID, but never an outbreak.”
No study recommends that this small number of cases be similar to classical Chinese medicine. Petre attributes them to increased awareness of coronavirus and stricter adherence to quarantine protocols in the Asian community.
“We all who here in Monterey Park, citizens and restaurants start practicing social estrangement, dress in masks and take temperatures at the end of December,” he said. “The fact that [in] the western San Gabriel Valley, citizens locked up early has reduced the number of cases, at least in the Monterey Park area.”
Petre also said that among Chinese patients admitted to Garfield, many sought to continue taking Chinese medicinal plants. They couldn’t because the hospital didn’t allow its use.
Another imaginable explanation of why the low number of COVID-19 cases in the San Gabriel Valley: verification or lack thereof. In Los Angeles County, about 20,000 checks were administered for 100,000 citizens, a check rate of about 20%. In the city of San Gabriel, this number is approximately 14,900 checks consisting of 100,000 inhabitants, a rate of just under 15%. According to research on the maximum recent knowledge provided through the Los Angeles Department of Health, in cities with a more consistent percentage of Chinese citizens, detection rates are in third place in all county cities.
In the western San Gabriel Valley, the Only check center to provide mandarin and Cantonese facilities was introduced to the Herald Christian Health Center on May 19, nearly two months after the maximum check centers opened in the county. This requires registration over the phone and patients must also enter a consent form.
“I think one of the most demanding situations is language,” said Pollyanna Lee, the Herald’s chief operating officer. “Most control sites in the county or state are done in English. And the commands are in English or Spanish only. This can be intimidating. They need to do it, but they don’t know how to get there, so it creates a barrier.”
As of July 31, the Herald Christian Test Center had conducted 2,333 tests, of which 101 were positive, a rate of 4.3%, a small number compared to the current Los Angeles County average of 7.3%.
It is also conceivable that many citizens of the San Gabriel Valley, especially Chinese immigrants, may not be reviewed because they are uninsured and cannot, or because they are concerned about deportation. And perhaps it is not widely known that verification at Los Angeles County sites is vague and that the county’s online covid check consultant is translated into Chinese.
According to Petre, Garfield Hospital receives about 140 patients each day and “approximately 10% of them are uninsured.”
Lu, the owner of Chinese Herbal Tang, said many Chinese employees only convenience and low load chinese herbal remedies.
Yang, the acupuncturist from Santa Monica, said the low numbers were due only to cash or evidence. It’s about self-sufficiency. The Chinese, he said, “don’t wait at home and do things. They heal themselves.”
WE LIKE TO ANSWER YOUR QUESTIONS