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Chinese medicine has been proven over 2000 years to be effective in treating various diseases including eczema. Many clinical studies have been completed on the effectiveness of various Chinese herbal formulas in the treatment of eczema. Unfortunately, these studies are completed in China and therefore written in the Chinese language making them not accessible to modern medical doctors. [This is why I learned to read Chinese to access this vital information!]. However, because of the remarkable success TCM doctors in England were having in the treatment of stubborn cases of eczema that would not respond to many types of conventional treatment, various skin doctors started to take notice. Doctors have a natural antipathy towards anecdotal evidence and so there seemed little else to do but to set up a proper scientific study in English. Multiple studies were conducted and reported in British medical journals. All studies concluded that Chinese herbal medicine was an effective treatment for atopic dermatitis and there were no side effects to these treatments.
One of these research projects (placebo-controlled double-blind trial) was a one year study2 of 37 children suffering from eczema conducted at The Hospital for Sick Children, London, England. This study revealed that Chinese herbal medicine offered an effective treatment particularly for those children who failed to respond to modern medical treatments. At the end of the study, 18 (49%) had at least a 90% reduction in the severity of their atopic dermatitis after 8 weeks of treatment. Another 5 cases (14%) improved to a lesser degree during the same length of time.
Why is there not more research on Chinese medicine in English? More and more research is being done in the English language but funding and ethics are the two major obstacles that limit the number of studies done in English. Pharmaceutical companies complete the majority of research projects of modern medicine. These companies make a return on their investment when they sell their product. The return on herbal medicine is not the same because this medicine (product) can be obtained from other sources other than the company. Modern medicine often will not recognize the effectiveness of a particular treatment unless it is proven to be effective by a placebo-controlled double-blind trial. Due to the placebo factor in these studies, this form of research denies treatment to individuals who need treatment and therefore goes against the ethics of TCM.
In addition, there are some major issues that need to be addressed when devising a scientific trial for alternative therapies. One of the main problems is that an alternative practitioner takes the ¡°whole¡± person into account, (this is often the main reason individuals seek out alternative therapists in the first place). A Western clinician will usually ignore other health complaints and diseases in order to be specific about an illness. For instance, while asthma and atopic eczema are recognized as frequently concurrent illnesses, a dermatologist will make a firm diagnosis of the skin complaint while a pulmonary specialist will diagnose the asthma and different remedies will be used for each. In Chinese medicine, both diseases would be addressed at the same time with one herbal formula. In other words, conventional treatments are aimed at the disease, not the whole person. In clinical practice, Chinese medicine is customized to the individual but for the sake of research, in th e above study the treatment had to be standardized for each patient. To minimize the error introduced by prescribing identical medicine for all patients, only those cases with a particular type of eczema according to the Chinese pattern discrimination were selected for the clinical trial. Although not ideal from a holistic perspective, all patients received the same herbal prescription. The only allowance made for individuality was in terms of dosage. I believe the results would have been even better if the study allowed the practitioner to further modify the patient¡¯s prescription based on their clinical presentation. Also it is important to remember the results obtained were spectacular given the circumstances and considering this study included only very severe cases of eczema.