Chinese healthcare products maker Quanjian under investigation over girl’s death in 2015
From South China Morning Post, Dec 28, 2018.
What Quanjian has done really hits home for me. It sets back my efforts in trying to modernize and legitimize Chinese medicine in world health care for who knows how long. I published my 2 recent books only months ago, which finally put my life, thoughts, and accomplishments on record. And only weeks ago, I started blogging in earnest. My ideas on modern drugs and herbal supplements are not ordinary; they are disruptive. They can radically change health care for the general population. Instead of the current modern, but expensive, toxic drug therapy for just the privileged few, a new class of tried-and-true natural therapeutics, derived from millennia of human experience, can be provided to the general population at affordable cost. They will financially impact the drug developers, makers, sellers, prescribers, and users of conventional drugs. And the dietary (herbal) supplement industry will have to undergo a readjustment before starting to provide affordable natural therapeutics to an increasing population as a true alternative to current toxic drugs.
This news about Quanjian’s providing ‘ancient’ or ‘secret’ Chinese cures for treating cancer reinforces the negative (‘charlatan’) image of Chinese medicine in peoples around the world who don’t know about it or have never experienced its beneficial effects. Because of this, it’s much more difficult for me now to explain how drugs and traditional medicines work in our body, irrespective of how and from where they originate. And this is just the scientific and traditional part. The other, and more difficult part is how to change greed in those who constitute a small minority of our population yet holds the money and power to maintain the vicious cycle that negatively affects the rest of us. But it is a self-generating, perpetual money-machine for this minority. Regardless, I still believe in the decency in the majority of our population. I believe the only way to counter greed is to remove the money incentives for drug makers and their interdependent associates by breaking the vicious cycle. For that, we need to enlist the consumers and honest politicians.
In my last post, I urged herbalists and herbal scientists to come together. I hope you have listened to my call. I have plans to start first with the identity and quality of true herbal supplements, which I have advocated for decades. I need your help to spread the word together with me. There are already interested like-minded parties willing to work with me, not to exploit our healthcare system, but to give fellow consumers an affordable alternative.
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