Here’s a conservation-related bit of news.  Although I don’t think China Bio Law will touch on environmental issues very much, conservation issues still seem to fit squarely within the scope of the site’s subject matter.  So I’ll throw in a post on it every once in a while.

The WWF has released an article describing a statement issued by the World Federation of Chinese Medicine Societies (WFCMS) in Beijing on the their disavowal of the use of tiger-based ingredients. This statement was issued in time for the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) meeting in Doha, which will continue until March 25.

However, I think the WWF article makes it seem like the WFCMS was only really promoting this out of concern for China’s international image.  For instance, they quote the deputy secretary of the WFCMS:

“We will ask our members not to use endangered wildlife in traditional Chinese medicine, and reduce the misunderstanding and bias of the international community,” said the WFCMS’ Huang Jianyin. “The traditional Chinese medicine industry should look for substitutes and research on economical and effective substitutes for tiger products, which will improve the international image and status of traditional Chinese medicine and promote TCM in the world.” (my emphasis)

That makes it seem like conservation of the tiger as a cause in itself is a secondary issue to not bringing down international censure.  The official statement (available at the WWF’s website, but only in Chinese), however, is much broader than that sentiment. For instance, it states:

In traditional Chinese culture, the tiger is a symbol of bravery and power, and it has powerful totemic and symbolic meaning.  The WFCMS is China’s international academic organization for Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), and while it pays attention to the development of TCM and to the transmission of  the culture of TCM, it also highly values and concerns itself with the preservation of tigers and other endangered plants and animals.  In accordance with the principle of man and nature developing in harmony, the WFCMS  wants to make a proper and positive contribution to the protection of tigers. (my translation)

However, some tension is amusingly evident in a following paragraph, where they try and distance themselves from the idea that tiger products are across the board illegitimate.  They decry how some individuals and organizations have been misinterpreting TCM principles and peddling tiger wares in order to make a quick buck.  However, they make sure to point out that “historical documents and records” and “thousands of years of medical practice” have confirmed that tiger bones are effective in:

• 追风健骨: Can’t find a direct English translation, literally “chasing wind, strengthening bones.”  But googling descriptions of its functionality gets me: promoting blood circulation by “removing blood stasis,” “expelling wind” and clearing away colds, relaxing muscles and strengthening the bones, alleviating pain, curing gout, joint malformation, repeated spasms of local pain, sciatica, lumbar muscle strain, hypertrophic spinal column inflammation, and rheumatism (granted, some of this may not be the official line);
• 定痛辟邪: again, can’t find a direct English translation, but as a type of analgesic;
• 治风痹: treating wandering arthritis (this term doesn’t seem to have a medical analogue outside of homeopathy circles);
• 拘挛疼痛: treating soreness from muscle constriction; and
• 惊悸癫痫: treating a certain type of epilepsy.

Now, I’m open to the idea that there may be legitimate medicinal uses for tiger bones, provided there was some unique aspect of tiger bone physiology.  However, thousands of years of unscientific practice and historical documents do not strike me as being the most reliable source of evidence for those uses.

I was originally just going to comment on the WFCMS statement, but there are a number of other interesting things going on here.

CITES has prohibited the international trade of tigers and tiger parts since its inception, back in 1975.  However, the convention does not supersede domestic law, and it is up to individual nations to pass domestic law regarding trade bans.  China became a member of CITES back in 1981, but did not ban the domestic tiger trade until 1993, under international pressure and/or nearly complete elimination of its wild tiger population.

Prior to the domestic ban, a number of tiger farms were set up in order to harvest the tigers for trade, and after the ban they ended up becoming tiger parks, where the tigers put on shows for tourists.  There are currently 20 of these safari parks left in China (NYT), and while sale of tiger parts is illegal, alcohol steeped in tiger bone is still a hot commodity.

Currently, conservationists generally want these tiger farms closed, tiger farm owners want the government to loosen trade restrictions in order to sell their backlog of frozen tiger carcasses, a number of economists believe that legalizing the tiger trade would be the best bet for the survival of the species, and other experts claim such an idea would inevitably lead to more wild poaching that would eliminate the wild tiger population, and tiger farms would probably be quite happy with that prospect.

Given how popular tiger-derived medicines are in China, I’d say a better bet would be to reduce the demand, and reduce it fast.  Not an easy thing, given the deep-seated traditions and the economic forces at play here.  But the role of advertising in reshaping people’s attitudes towards the world and towards certain products can be fairly powerful.  Scarily so, sometimes.  (See, especially, this 2008 article).  Linking the use of tiger products with people’s disgust reactions would be great, but China’s television is so sanitized that I wonder if it could be done well.

Sources:

• CITES website
• Entry on Tiger Trade
• NYT
• WSJ
• WSJ
• The Hindu
• UPI Asia

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has only come in tangentially during my research, but it is still an interesting topic to me.  TCM is undeniably a force in China.  TCM has it’s own government bureau, the State Administration for Traditional Chinese Medicine (中华人民共和国国家中医药管理局, note: their website was down at the time of writing this post), which is under the auspices of the Ministry of Health.  TCM and Western medicine exist side-by-side in China as facets of the public healthcare system, albeit sometimes antagonistically.  Even in China, doctors trained in Western methods are highly skeptical of TCM; but its cultural stature and pull means it continues to be a mainstay in Chinese society.

One of the current goals in China is the “modernization” of TCM, essentially a systematic rechecking of TCM medicines and methods through standard clinical and research trials.  And this is laudable, but what I did not appreciate were the inherent difficulties involved in assessing TCM based on “Western” methods (i.e. randomized controlled trials).  I was reading a report about research ethics in China, published by the UK’s Medical Research Council, and they had a section on TCM and precisely this problem.  To summarize, standardized TCM research in China can be difficult for five reasons:

1. Many TCM treatments, ideally, are individualized and holistic; it would be exceedingly difficult to set up truly randomized, controlled trials because it would be impossible to find similarly-afflicted individuals who require the same exact treatment.
2. Because much of TCM relies on herbal medicine, there are difficulties in purifying the proper extract in trials, because the unadultered plants or mixtures may have ingredients that interact with each other.
3. Standardization may be difficult because the proportions of different compounds may be different in each treatment using the same medicine.
4. Using a placebo in place of actual TCM may be ethically dubious in China, where practitioners and patients might believe that the efficacy of a certain treatment is already proven.  Ethically withholding that treatment is then problematic.
5. While assessing TCM treatment of some disease, you may be neglecting to provide a patient with Western medicine already proven to treat the patient’s disease.

I do not think that any of these are truly insurmountable difficulties; I suppose I am just once again struck by the observation that “holisticity” is such an easy gateway to unfalsifiability.  The idea that something is so complicated and dependent on other factors that it is unprovable.  Anything that toes that line inevitably risks association with disingenuousness and blind faith.

“Because such methods work, there is no reason to seek the causes of their effectiveness…In a tradition like that, you do not have to know why something works.  Rather, you just have to follow the example of others.  From knowing the past, one obtains those methods for ensuring one’s own existence.  Moreover, these methods are not isolated techniques; they are embedded in, and naturally carry with them a set of values.  When we say that some technique is effective (灵验), we mean that there is some unknown magic behind it.  If you use that technique, you will have luck; if you don’t, you will have problems.  Therefore, people grow up in awe of tradition.”