TCM classifies green tea, milk, and ice cream as having a cold nature, so practitioners recommend avoiding them during the summer months.

This year's Chinese medicine response echoes the response to the SARS epidemic six years ago. At the time, Chinese news media reported shortened hospital stays for SARS patients who took traditional medicine, sometimes in combination with Western medicine. Chinese communities in Hong Kong and Singapore also saw throngs of worried citizens rushing to Chinese medicine stores to buy herbs to ward off the disease.

Since the outbreak of H1N1, Chinese media have reported increased sales of Indigowoad Root, known locally as banlangen, and even a 50 percent increase in the price of honeysuckle, both of which are thought to treat the flu.

During regular hospital visits, Chinese patients are much more likely to consult Western medicine, rather than traditional medicine. Statistics reported in the local newspaper Fazhi Wanbao show that out of 5,000-8,000 daily patients to the Beijing Friendship Hospital, only 200-300 consulted the Chinese medicine division.

But in the uncertain face of a modern epidemic, some Chinese are turning to traditional culture and ancient sources, such as the 2,000-year-old Chinese medical guide Neijing Suwen or The Inner Canon of Huangdi for solutions. One blog on the popular portal Sina even uses the text to fix a date to the end of the epidemic: July 23.

Yet Chinese medicine's effectiveness against SARS was never proven conclusively, and even more uncertainty surrounds H1N1. In a 2003 report of the Institute of Traditional Medicine in Portland, Oregon, director Dr Subhuti Dharmananda concluded, "With a new disease like SARS, it is almost impossible to know if the herbs that may have prevented or treated a similar disease will be effective for this one."

One factor hampering TCM is that many Chinese treatments still lack Western clinical research support. Some doctors of Chinese medicine, like Dr Qi, argue that treatment should continue even without research evidence.

"The outcomes of some physical and chemical tests in Western medicine and their relation to evidence for Chinese medicine are still unclear, so we cannot bother with that for the moment," says Dr Qi. Others argue that Western methods of scientific research aren't suitable for Chinese medicine's focus on individual treatment.

However, even some doctors who practice Chinese medicine are wary of the Ministry of Health's announcement, arguing that Chinese medicine cannot be blanket-prescribed. "Certain groups of people, like the 'young and healthy crowd' susceptible to the swine flu, might have certain commonalities, so preventions may have certain similarities, but this is only an approximation," says Dr Qi.

Dr Fruehauf insists that, to be effective, traditional Chinese treatments must be tailored to the individual: "No responsible Chinese medicine physician would blanket-prescribe the same remedy for thousands of people and expect that it will work for all of them."

(China Daily June 24, 2009)