Traditional Chinese Medicine Is Coming for COVID-19
While Trump’s reported fondness for an unproven plant extract as COVID-19 cure may be just his latest deranged fantasy, some experts say the U.S. is sleeping on plausible options.
CHINE NOUVELLE/SIPA/Shutterstock
As COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc across the planet, hospitals have repurposed drugs like remdesivir, an antiviral, and dexamethasone, a cheap steroid, to combat the deadly disease. Meanwhile, Chinese scientists and pharmacologists have been looking to the ancient wisdom of Eastern medicine to explore approaches American biomedical researchers would never consider.
At the tail end of the worst of China’s own COVID-19 outbreak, the government there claimed that more than 92 percent of patients nationwide had been treated with traditional medicines, some of which lean on substances like honeysuckle, magnolia bark, rhubarb, sweet wormwood and, of course, forsythia—of Contagion fame.
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