Lianhua Qingwen Capsules (LQC), which are also used against seasonal influenza, have been part of China’s standard of care against COVID-19 since February 2020, and countries like Thailand and Laos have also embraced the product. LQC, composed of 13 herbs, is said to have “a curative effect in patients with mild symptoms and helps to relieve fever, cough and fatigue,” and may also “help prevent the disease from worsening.” Research shows patients who received LQC along with “usual treatment” had improved recovery rates compared to controls (91.5% versus 82.4%). They also recovered faster (seven versus 10 days). Are these data accurate and of practical significance for COVID-19 disease management?

These data are a fair representation of the capabilities of this medicinal approach. There are many valid observations throughout history that have culminated in traditional Chinese medicine. What it does is provide a kind of broad-based augmentation of the body’s systems, including activities that are both prophylactic as well as a kind of treatment rebalancing an optimization of bodily function. This is true of many natural products throughout the plant kingdom incorporated into medicine by indigenous peoples and refined by scientists and practitioners through the centuries in Asia as well as Western countries. We always encourage such approaches because in being broad-based, they give you extra options in a sense, more bullets in the gun, so to speak. It might not be important and a critical benefit for some who are infected with the virus, but for others may be rate-determining and even lifesaving. So we like a broad-based approach when dealing with a scourge of this kind rather than to rely on one narrow therapeutic strategy. Keep in mind that the karma of the individual is always a wild card, no two people are alike with regard to their own karmic history, and that will play out in the vulnerability they have to infection in the first place as well as what might happen within the body in mounting a counter-response. People vary greatly in the various mechanisms through which immunity is maintained from the onslaught from the microbial world that is a part of the natural environmental habitat humans are immersed in. It is not possible to predict in what way particular individuals are deficient in something needed for self-protection for which a nutritional substance in an herbal remedy might be just what is needed to fill that gap but for others be unneeded. So this is a case where more is truly more, whether it is needed in a particular instance is less important than it is available if and when it could be important for the wellbeing of a particular individual.