Chinese Medicine for treating AIDS – 8 yuan per day
[The Beijing News 25 August 2004]

Mr. Wei Jian’an, who is in charge of AIDS treatment using Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), clarifies that the actual project of AIDS treatment by TCM is limited to five provinces and 2300 people, adding that the project started rather late in China.

Reasons of this dialogue

On 20 August 2004, the Ministry of Health, National Management Office of Chinese Medicine and Ministry of Finance jointly organized an AIDS prevention and care project in five Chinese provinces: Hebei, Anhui, Henan, Hubei and Guangzhou. They were allocated a total of 9 million yuan to treat 2300 HIV/AIDS patients by TCM free of charge. TCM treatment for AIDS in China started relatively late, the official settlement of this project today engraves a starting point in Aids treatment in China.

Yesterday afternoon, the person in charge of this project – Wei Jian’an, director of the Hospital Management department, Standing Vice-director of the AIDS TCM treatment center in the Chinese Institute for TCM research, and director of the Chinese Institute for TCM research, AIDS clinical research center of Guang’An Men hospital – discussed this issue with a reporter from this newspaper.

News report on 30,000 HIV+ people to be treated with TCM was not factual

• Beijing News: It’s been 2 days now since national media reporter the news that 30.000 HIV+ people would be freely treated by TCM over 15 provinces and regions, the news was quite exciting.
• Wei Jian’an: I’m really astonished. I don’t know where this false information is coming from.
• Beijing News: According to the reports, the information came from the State Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine [SATCM].
• Wei Jian’an: Yesterday I checked this information with SATCM, and their answer was that they never released such information. This news report is clearly wrong. The office hopes that the media will correct this.
• Beijing News: Then what is the correct information?
• Wei Jian’an: According to the National plan of AIDS prevention the government is going to offer free treatment for AIDS and related diseases to 30,600 persons over 15 provinces and autonomous regions. Regarding the free TCM treatment, the project is only covering 5 provinces, Hebei, Anhui, Henan, Hubei and Guanzhou, and the number of people receiving free treatment is limited to 2300.
• Beijing News: On what basis were these 5 provinces chosen?
• Wei Jian’an: One necessary condition was that those provinces must be heavily affected [by AIDS]. At the same time, AIDS prevention and control work should have a strong foundation and be properly run, and another important factor was the local authorities’ willingness to actively cooperate with the government was also part of the choice.
• Beijing News: We heard that all these 2300 people were from rural areas ?
• Wei Jian’an: Yes, they are all rural and poor, they basically can’t afford the Aids treatment expenses, another common point to these 2300 people is that they were all contaminated through blood selling. Those people deserve our pity.
• Beijing News: When does the project start?
• Wei Jian’an: It is already going on in some of the chosen provinces. Since March 2004 in Hebei and Henan, patients are already receiving free treatment using TCM.
• Beijing News: what are the results for these 6 months?
• Wei Jian’an: Survey data is being collected now, and are still not fully collected yet. Judging from what I have been told thus far, results don’t seem to be bad. Many patients receiving free “cocktail” [ed. ARV] treatment are now asking to be treated with TCM, but we had to refuse them because of our own quota.
• Beijing News: For HIV+ citizen or those who can afford to pay for the treatment, how can they get treated with TCM?
• Wei Jian’an: These patients can get standardized TCM treatment AIDS clinics belonging to big hospitals of these 5 provinces, and also in Guang’an Men , Ditan and YouAn hospitals in Beijing.

　TCM advantages: 3000 yuan a year and a faster start-up

• Beijing News: What is your opinion of China launching free “Cocktail” treatment?
• Wei Jian’an: Take this example: Imagine that we give only a bag of rice to a starving person, but we don’t give him electricity, or water or a pot. If you are not able to cook the rice, it will be very difficult to solve the starvation problem.
• Beijing News: In this case what are the water and the electricity standing for?
• Wei Jian’an: You have at least to meet two conditions: If patients have drugs but don’t know how to take them, you‘ll need to have qualified and experienced doctors; Also, cocktail therapy has strict demands as to how drugs are used, such as CD4 counts and viral load counts. I have frequent contact with the person who invented “cocktail” therapy, Mr. He Dayi, and he has told me many times that if the starting conditions are insufficient, then you shouldn’t use the cocktail treatment unless you want to produce the opposite results. And one more thing, you can only use Western medicine at a certain time, you must wait until the right time for treatment.
• Beijing News: Why would you see “opposite results”?
• Wei Jian’an: There are two risks: one is to waste limited funds, and the other is to produce resistance which could lead to bigger treatment difficulties in the following years.
• Beijing News: about the “missing water and electricity” problem? Our newspaper reported about this problem in the past, but has this problem now been solved?
• Wei Jian’an: Actually, the Chinese Health Ministry is now conscious of the gravity of the problem, and is already carrying out large scale training doctors on AIDS treatment. Not so long ago I went to visit Henan, and the medical institutions told me there that they had already bought the CD4 count machine and that it will be soon installed and ready to use.
• Beijing News: Compared to Western medicine, what are the advantages of the TCM treatment?
• Wei Jian’an: 10 years of experience and research shown that the AIDS treatment using TCM has many advantages: 1)Medicines are numerous and can be find everywhere; 2)Their low cost is fitting nearly all the patients capacity; 3)There is little resistance to the treatment and few side effects, and they are also easily managed by village doctors; 4)They can be used as soon as a person has been tested and declared HIV+, but you can only use the western medicines at a specific time.
• Beijing News: How much does the treatment cost?
• Weijin’an : The treatment costs 8 Yuan per day per person, about 3000 Yuan per year.
• Beijing News: the cocktail is costing 4000 Yuan per year per person, so on this point the advantage is not that clear.
• Wei Jian’an: But strictly speaking, during the cocktail treatment you should also do 3 CD4 tests and 3 viral loads as well, and each one of these test costs 200 and 1000 Yuan respectively. So in reality, proper ARV treatment costs almost 10,000 Yuan a Year. Therefore, the TCM treatment is far less expensive than the Western one.
• Beijing News: Why can’t the western medicines can be used earlier, isn’t it always better to treat earlier?
• Wei Jian’an: The treatment for AIDS is very specific, the cocktail is only appropriately used once the viral level reaches a certain level. To take the medicines earlier would not only have the danger of producing more sides effects, but would also be likely to generate resistance to the drug.
• Beijing News: So that’s the motivation for the TCM AIDS treatment then?
• Wei Jian’an: Yes, and waiting is never good for any kind of treatment. So early treatment initiation is the biggest advantage of the TCM AIDS treatment.

More patients under TCM treatment

• Beijing News: One of the special things about TCM is that treatment is designed for each individual patient [ed. rather than each disease]. Does this lead to a great increase in the work load?
• Wei Jian’an: Yes. The TCM stresses individual treatment, so it is very difficult to form generalized [ed. standardized] treatments. For example, facing the same patient, 3 Western doctors will be able to give him the same protocols, but 3 TCM doctors will give him 3 different protocols, this is the problem.
• Beijing News: So in the treatment process, how is this standardization problem solved?
• Wei Jian’an: At present, The State Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine [SATCM] has organized experts and issued a document “Five Province TCM Clinical AIDS training guidelines”. They chose for safe TCM combinations that showed some clinical effectiveness, and doctors must choose from five set protocols when writing prescriptions. At present, the Chinese medicine is separated into two types, pills and 5 drug combinations. Based on clinical symptoms, patients are divided according to 3 main phases and 12 categories, and during the treatment patients will pass through different phases and therefore will take different medicines. This is how the problem of standardization of treatment was solved.
• Beijing News: At present, only 2,300 patients are under treatment, but in the future there could be thousands or even a million patients. Won’t it be a huge amount of work to treat each patient individually?
• Wei Jian’an: This is all the complexity of TCM, it is impossible to avoid.
• Beijing News: is it a mixed treatment made of western medicines and TCM ones ?
• Wei Jian’an: No, the 2300 patients are taking only chinese medicines.
• Beijing News: Today we know that TCM can be really effective on AIDS complications and that western medicine is essentially good for the virus itself. Is it a risk that taking only TCM will treat the disease superficially instead of treating it deeply?
• Wei Jian’an: This is not true, and most of the patients we choose [for TCM treatment] are those who do not meet the criteria for ARV “cocktail” treatment. Western medicines and TCM both have sides effects, but the TCM is also strongly curbing the AIDS virus.
• Beijing News: I would like to know, if a patient only takes TCM on a long-term basis, is it possible to live as long as a patient treated with ARVs?
• Wei Jian’an: Yes, that’s not a problem.

The TCM Aids treatment started with cooperation between China and Tanzania

• Beijing News: Even though China only started a TCM AIDS prevention and control project this year, didn’t China already start – 10 years ago - to implement a similar project abroad?
• Wei Jian’an: Yes, since the 1960’s a Chinese medical team has been offering help in Africa, lots of African people start to know about and accept TCM treatment - they used to call our experts “spirit doctors”. In 1987, when the Tanzanian president came to visit China, he hoped that the Chinese government could send a team of TCM experts to Tanzania to help his country fight AIDS. Since that, the National TCM Research Institute and Tanzania started a TCM AIDS treatment project. Chinese experts have already treated nearly 10,000 AIDS patients using TCM.
• Beijing News: How effective has TCM been in the Tanzanian AIDS treatment project?
• Wei Jian’an: Very good, patients who received the treatment are all living very well. For example, China and Tanzania have renewed their collaboration contract once every 3 years since the beginning, and the last two renewals were accompanied by strong Tanzanian requests [for renewal]. If the results were not good, then Tanzania wouldn’t be actively asking for renewal.
• Beijing News: So why did it take such a long time to start AIDS treatment using TCM in China?
• Wei Jian’an: Here is the context: in 1995, the official number of HIV+ people in China was still under 1000. This led to a [false] impression, that AIDS was not an important problem in China. At that time, government propaganda was seen as more important than AIDS prevention and treatment.
• Beijing News: It’s been nearly 10 years. At the time, as a Chinese medicine expert, did you discover this problem?
• Wei Jian’an: in 1999 and 2000, I was sent to Tanzania to help them treat AIDS. When I returned to China in October 2000, the AIDS problem was already quite severe, but there was still no medical institution working to treat AIDS with TCM. So I submitted a proposal to create a designated TCM clinical site to treat AIDS to the Ministry of Finance, the Beijing Health Bureau, the Beijing Office of Chinese Medicine Management and Guang’An Men hospital, where I was working.
• Beijing News: What were the results?
• Wei Jian’an: Quite painful and complicated, but fortunately concerned institutions had already started to pay attention to the AIDS problem. In November 2001, the government allocated a sum of money and the first official institution for TCM AIDS treatment was created in Guang’An Men hospital.
• Beijing News: And today, it can’t still be only your one institution?
• Wei Jian’an: Unfortunately it is. Today the clinic of TCM AIDS treatment of Guang’An Men hospital is the only one in China.
• Beijing News: Why?
• Wei Jian’an: Discrimination mainly, the fact that AIDS patients were visiting doctors at the hospital was scaring other patients. But an even more important reason is that at present 90% of HIV+ people are rural, and most of them can’t afford a consultation or treatment. This is why many provincial hospitals are under so much pressure to build up specialized AIDS departments. These days the clinic in Guang’An Men receives far more patients for counseling than for treatment. This explains pretty well the situation at present.
• Beijing News: Would you say that we must rely on the government for AIDS treatment?
• Wei Jian’an: Yes, AIDS treatment must be led by the government, with specific funds allocated. Treatment should be developed in a scientific, standardized, and systematic manner. We cannot continue the uncoordinated efforts of the past.
• Beijing News: What is the value of the national TCM AIDS treatment project?
• Wei Jian’an: It is very important, the official initiation of this project today marks a starting point in AIDS treatment in China.

TCM Aids treatment is not limited to China

• Beijing News: In addition to China, there a lot of other countries implementing research to treat AIDS with TCM, right?
• Wei Jian’an: Yes. Korea, Japan, and Singapore have already started research on Chinese medicines to treat AIDS, this research is very hot these days.
• Beijing News: What is the level of their research? Where does China stand in research position?
• Wei Jian’an: TCM is after all from China, and China has a leading position in TCM research. However, that leading position is already under serious attach. Thus, China must put a stress on TCM research.
• Beijing News: Where does China stand in terms of Western medicine research?
• Wei Jian’an: In china, the development of Western medicine for AIDS treatment is nearly impossible. Technically we are far away behind other countries, and the development of such medicine is too expensive. Today the AIDS drugs (ARVs) produced in China are all generic copies. There is not a single registered, patented ARV produced by Chinese companies.
• Beijing News: Can we say that TCM might an innovation in AIDS medicine research?
• Wei Jian’an: Absolutely! There are 5167 types of plant medicine noted in the full TCM dictionary. It’s impossible to exclude the possibility that Chinese experts can find a miracle in it. China has to develop its long term potential, in order to establish its position in the field of medicine research worldwide.
• Beijing News: If this year’s results on AIDS treatment using TCM are good, will the project be extended next year?
• Wei Jian’an: According to what I’ve heard in meetings, if the results are good, next year the number of provinces should be raised up to 10 and the number of beneficiaries doubled as well.

Reporter: Gao Ming in beijing

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