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Q: Why do doctors & pharmacies always try to prescribe a dose of Chinese medicine with Western ones?
12 years 32 weeks ago in Health & Safety - China
i am practicing medicine in Chengdu. well i could see that happening all the time. i have no idea about TCM. may be TCM medicines are tying to build a kind of immunity or something. who knows.
The data I am giving a rough, but it's more or less this number.
In China, the healthcare system, contrary to many Western countries, is essentially privatized. Even if you have local public hospitals, they are only supported by the local or national government for a max of 30% of their running operations.
Therefore, in order to function properly and to be able to pay for the maintenance costs, the facilities, the salaries, they need to bill enough to cover the remaining 70%, and more in order to generate benefits.
How can you generate money in a Chinese hospital : VIP system (registration fees can go from RMB 15 to RMB 800), requesting non necessary procedures (blood tests, urine, MRI, X-rays), and finally prescribing medicines (the more they prescribe, the more they bill, the better the hospital works).
Mixing Chinese medicine with Western medicines is another way of over-prescription.
As for Chinese medicine. One must understand that there is a difference between the Traditional Chinese medicine which are directly produced by mixing different plants and the so-called Traditional Chinese medicine that you receive in a pharmaceutical package.
Mixing plants together has very little side effects on the health of a person, while industrialization of medicine have.
I hope it gives you some ideas why it's like that.
Two reasons that I have discovered in the working at three so called "TCM" hospitals; the first is profit for the hospital along with an increased salary to the doctor and the second being the customer's demand, due to the popular belief that everything from the west must be better.
Well how do you keep people using the TCM.... you "show" them it works. If I gave you some Western pills (with a scientific name that you don't understand) that would cure you and then told you to eat ground up starfish as well, which one of the two would you remember and tell you friends about how much it cured you?
