Is naturopathic medicine necessarily safe?

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Recently, an article by a Danish doctor, titled “Chinese herbal remedy found to contain steroids and antifungals”was published in the journal Lancet [1].He described a patient with early-onset guttate psoriasis who had been prescribed the Chinese herbal ointment Shenfucao by a doctor in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM).The Danish doctor suspected that the ointment contained hormones.Subsequently,he sent Shenfucao to Sweden for testing and found that it contained clobetasol propionate and antifungal drugs including ketoconazole and miconazole.However,these ingredients were not mentioned on the drug label.In addition,according to the financial channel of China Central Television, in April 2018, an "old Chinese doctor" in Changzhou, Jiangsu province, China, claimed to have an ancestral ointment recipe that produced immediate effects.However, the test results showed that the ointments contained western medicine ingredients,along with prohibited ingredients,such as morphine.

This is not the first time such a thing has happened.In 2018, the herbal medicine Yiganerjing was found to contain clobetasol propionate, ketoconazole, and miconazole, which were banned by the United Kingdom Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency [2].Nevertheless, on various e-commerce platforms in China,including Jingdong and Taobao,Shenfucao and Yiganerjing are still selling well.

All these instances reflect the abuse of TCM.The combination of Chinese and Western medicines has been licensed for the development of new drugs in China, but concealing the ingredients of Western medicines and adding the Western medicines that have not been proven safe and effective are not allowed.In 2019, the Standing Committee of the 10th Session of the 13th National People's Congress of China rejected the revised draft of the Drug Administration Law,suggesting that China may need to further strengthen its management policies,to restrict the production and sale of counterfeit and inferior drugs.

TCM has been optimized for millennia as a brilliant and versatile resource for the treatment of various diseases.The records and descriptions in TCM have been gradually completed, based on direct clinical feedback from the patients.However, in the last decade, the clinical therapeutic effect of TCM has been questioned, and lack of consensus between TCM and modern medicine has occurred intermittently.We should be mindful that all medicines, whether traditional or modern, must be proven safe and effective before they are used in the management of human health[3].Hence,researchers in the pharmacy enterprise should adhere to scientific theories,use updated techniques,commit to solving the issues in the field of TCM,and develop licensed medicines based on well-refined procedures.