Coronavirus: Chinese medicine may help relieve ‘long Covid’ symptoms such as fatigue, Hong Kong study shows
- First and largest study shows traditional therapy helped patients suffering from fatigue, coughing and shortness of breath
- Hospital authority says 64,000 patients have been treated with Chinese medicine
Hong Kong’s first study on using traditional Chinese medicine to treat patients with “long Covid” has found the therapy can ease symptoms such as fatigue in more than one in three patients.
The findings, announced at a press conference on Wednesday, came days after Hospital Authority chief executive Henry Fan Hung-ling called for a “significant expansion” of the role traditional Chinese medicine plays in public healthcare and greater collaboration between its practitioners and Western doctors.
“There were 1,390 patients treated with Chinese medicine before the fifth wave, and now there are 64,000 of them, so there has been a big increase in our capacity in Chinese medicine provision,” said Rowena Wong, the authority’s chief manager for the alternative treatment practice.
“In future, we will continue to proactively support the innovation and development of Chinese medicine within public hospitals.”
Chinese medicine has played an increasingly larger role in public healthcare during the Covid-19 pandemic, especially after the fifth wave that peaked in March, when experts from the Greater Bay Area came to guide the city’s response in treating coronavirus patients at the makeshift facility at AsiaWorld-Expo.
