Traditional Chinese Medicine

[GhostOfHarrow]

Quick question. Has anybody had an experiences with TCM. Im in Vietnam as I have previously stated and are now working with a herbalist as well as doing my 3 monthly visits to the hematologist.

[lankisterguy Volunteer]

There was a discussion yesterday around mushrooms as treatment, the replies are appropriate for TCM - please follow the links in the long detailed answers here:healthunlocked.com/cllsuppo...

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Short summary- the herbalists and similar often treat all cancers as the same disease and suggest ingredients that activate parts of the immune system. That could actually make CLL get worse.

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Len

[AussieNeil Partner Administrator]

I would be very interested to know how many previous cases of CLL your herbalist has seen, because CLL is extremely rare in Asia, thought to be due to genetic differences. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/360...

It's already quite rare in Western countries, so much so, that most general practice doctors (GPs or PCPs), may only see a few cases in their entire career. seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/h...

cancer.net/cancer-types/leu... The Australian Leukaemia Foundation did a survey about 10 years ago and found that Australian GPs typically saw about 6 cases of lymphoma in their entire career. There are about 80 different types of lymphoma, with CLL being the most common adult form in the Western world. The incidence is about 1.1 per 100,000 in the USA and per my first reference, less than a quarter of that, 0.27 per 100,000 or about 1 in 400,000 in China, where Chronic Myeloid Leukaemia is most common. This is a very important distinction, because the much touted thousands of years of TCM experience will primarily be with CML, not CLL and treatments for the two illnesses are quite different, because they originate from different stem cell lines in the bone marrow.

Also, if you find something that works from your herbalist, be aware that one of the problems with TCM is the duplication of herb names, which can result in poisonous substitutions, per this sad case of Chinese Herbal Nepropathy, causing kidney failure

sciencedirect.com/science/a...

Neil