Expired: Hong Kong government's ideas about Chinese medicine are clearly past their sell-by date
Philip Yeung says despite a stated goal to nurture this traditional industry, Hong Kong's fossilised thinking and a lack of coordination between officials mean we're falling behind the competition
For ages, traditional Chinese medicine has lived in the shadows as alternative medicine. But overnight, with a Chinese medicine researcher anointed as this year's Nobel co-laureate for medicine, it has acquired a halo of legitimacy.
In Hong Kong, however, Chinese medicine seems about to enter the dark ages. Designated as a new pillar industry, it never got anything except governmental lip service. After six years of inaction under Donald Tsang Yam-kuen, the government is now set to impose tough regulations on proprietary Chinese medical products. More than 8,000 Chinese remedies face being taken off the shelves unless they are standard-compliant, threatening to squeeze the life out of the industry.
Insiders blame the government for three strategic blunders. First, it asks thousands of Chinese herbal remedies to meet tough European standards as Western drugs, not health products, forgetting that ours is too small a market for manufacturers to bear the cost of compliance.
Our medical bureaucracy is top-heavy with Western-trained doctors who do not know that multi-herb formulations are too complex for their active ingredients to be isolated by Western procedures.
As the Chinese Medicine Ordinance prohibits sales outside licensed premises, traders are also shut out of e-commerce in this age of the internet. Clearly, Hong Kong doesn't know the first thing about nurturing industries
To apply US Food and Drug Administration-style requirements on herbal medicine is to cause its death by regulatory strangulation. Why not emulate Canada and treat Chinese herbal medicines as "natural health products"?
Second, the idea of integrating the Chinese medicine market within Greater China has never occurred to our leaders, though our tiny market size can't sustain its healthy development. China has its own regulatory body for Chinese medicinal products. It makes no sense for Hong Kong to go its own way.
