(CNN)Karen Kwai-Ching Li, called KC, has lived in fear of her osteosarcoma, most cancers of the bone, for nearly 28 years. She was diagnosed in 1991, at the age of 10, however, failed medicine over months resulted in her tumors spreading, main to an amputation of her leg. After the surgery and 6 rounds of chemotherapy, she went into remission. Using her prosthetic leg to get around, she keeps peering at Dr. Godfrey Chan, a pediatric oncologist at Queen Mary Hospital in Hong Kong, to reveal her recuperation and ensure that cancer doesn’t go back.
KC, a cancer patient at Queen Mary clinic, Hong Kong
My situation has been quite solid,” she stated. KC became a seemingly contrasting exercise: conventional Chinese medicine to get through her remedy and the range of aspect consequences of chemotherapy. Each time she had chemotherapy, her body seemed vulnerable, she said. Friends and family advocated the plant root ginseng, whose benefits are believed to boost energy, with the latest research supporting that claim. When her own family prepared ginseng for her to drink, she felt “greater energized and regained a bit greater electricity,” she explained, which led her to use it after each chemotherapy session.
But she took it with Chan’s blessing — because Chan isn’t always your typical oncologist. Though Chan practices modern Western remedies, his father turned into a practitioner of conventional Chinese medication. After a childhood surrounded using herbs and treatments, he’s bringing the two collectively to discover the medical price of herbal medicinal drugs. His own family history gives him a part, assisting him in bridging a medical divide to the advantage of patients like KC, particularly inside the cultural melting pot of Hong Kong.
Advantages and headaches
“We already have quite a few records from history that we recognize that a number of this formula works [and] a number of these components does now not paintings. It’s like a treasure mine,” Chan said. By exploring the energetic substances of thousands of items utilized in Chinese medication, Chan believes he may want to discover remedy combos to assist patients in healing quicker.
Powdered herbs fill his lab at the University of Hong Kong, in which his team cautiously measures and tests the properties of elements in vials and how they react with chemical compounds and human cells. We observe traditional Chinese medicine in a greater holistic manner,” he said. But such a merger calls for due diligence to make certain the herbs supplement, in preference to confound or damage, any modern-day treatment — specifically with something as sensitive as a cancer treatment.
We need to be very cautious, due to the fact other than blessings, we also can cope with headaches,” Chan said.
One instance, he explained, is lingzhi, a Chinese mushroom taken by lots of his cancer patients, with steering and supervision. They consider that it could decorate immune features. However, for sufferers with cancers of the immune system, such as leukemia, the use of such an herb may want to help cancer proliferate. Here, “it is probably now not clever,” he stated.
The lingzhi mushroom is thought to assist immune features.
For KC, the final results of two therapies turned higher than one, she stated, and they believe “the mixing of healing procedures to be a future trend in Hong Kong,” and extra globally. Investment within the destiny Chan is likewise looking to provide proof for combining Eastern and Western remedies because he said people are already doing so without knowing the real blessings — or the viable harms. In the 1990s, he said, a observe he conducted revealed that almost half of-of his patients have been taking Chinese medicine in
Mixture with their cancer treatment. This fueled his desire to be able to tell them. Some of them clearly discussed [using both] with me,” he stated. “But maximum of them, they do not. They failed to bother to inform me. The authorities have since supplied investment and assets for extra research into Chinese medicinal herbs, he explained, constructing hospitals and clinics for the University of Hong Kong school of medication and ensuring more excellent control. I suppose there will be greater probabilities for integration within the future,” Chan stated
