Wang Yuke finds many academics and practitioners see the city as an ideal venue for taking treatments abroad.

Hong Kong has fertile ground for developing and promoting traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) as the craft has been an integral part of culture and everyday life in the city, reckoned Dang Yi from the School of Chinese Medicine of Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU).

TCM had deep roots in Hong Kong thanks to the city's proximity to Guangdong province, she said. Dang was positive about prospects for TCM being appreciated and embraced by the world. "I've seen an influx of overseas students coming to our university in recent years to study Chinese medicine for a degree or through a short-term exchange program."

Dang, who came to Hong Kong in 1998, has witnessed the development of TCM in the city. She remembers when she arrived she saw many local people stopping by street stores and downing a bowl of dark, bitter brew that was credited with helping ward off disease or to keep healthy. The brew, or leung cha in Cantonese, is a Chinese herbal preparation which has been a basic TCM treatment for thousands of years.

Today on the Chinese mainland, doctors still prescribe Chinese herbs to patients, especially for curing chronic diseases. In Hong Kong, lou fo tong - Cantonese long-boiled soup - forms part of people's meals and is considered a component of a wholesome diet. People living in other parts of southern China have the same drink.

Hong Kong could be an ideal place to further boost the culture and cultivate more skilled Chinese medicine practitioners, Dang said.

"It is easy for Hong Kong people to take TCM on board." For the same reason, Hong Kong was chosen to be the host city for the first International Chinese Medicine Cultural Festival held from May to September this year.

Since Hong Kong's return to the country in 1997, the SAR government has stepped up efforts to promote the culture of TCM which is listed as one of the 480 intangible cultural heritage items of Hong Kong.

The first chief executive of the HKSAR Tung Chee-hwa proposed building a Chinese medicine "port" as well as the Cyberport. Since the enactment of the Chinese Medicine Ordinance in 1999, the SAR government has strived to improve the regulatory regime for Chinese medicine for the public's health and well-being. Another goal is to give Chinese medicine practitioners in the city professional status. The Committee on Research and Development of Chinese Medicine, established in January 2013, comprises Chinese medicine practitioners, people in the trade, academia, research institutes and healthcare sectors. The committee is responsible for reviewing policies and making recommendations to the government.

Another milestone marking Hong Kong's ambitions on TCM education was reached in 2002. With a HK$100 million fund from the Jockey Club, the School of Chinese Medicine of HKBU was set up to promote Chinese medicine education and research. Other universities in Hong Kong followed suit.

Soon after that, HKBU recruited academics from the mainland specializing in TCM to engage in teaching and research.

Dang believes many mainland professors, well-versed in TCM knowledge and classical textbooks, are very good at teaching TCM and spreading their knowledge.

Most disciplines are taught in English in Hong Kong's universities, but she said students' proficiency in Chinese and familiarity with the classical TCM books were still important.

A limitation of Hong Kong's TCM education is that students are not permitted to perform medical procedures such as acupuncture on real patients until they receive the certificate. They can only observe their mentors demonstrating the process. Today many mainland hospitals welcome Hong Kong students to take internships there.

Cross-boundary exchange

"Hands-on experience is important to TCM students and the mainland offers the opportunities," Dang pointed out. With a large population and a great number of patients on the mainland, students could encounter different cases of illness during their internships, enriching their clinical experience, she added.

There are more than 20 specialized Chinese medicine universities in the country and each has its own systematic teaching approaches. But this is absent in Hong Kong, where "TCM programs" are either provided by the School of Chinese Medicine or accessible in the form of vocational training and interest classes, Dang said.

She also noted that TCM education in mainland universities had greater focus on specialties. The program could be divided into a number of disciplines, such as Science of Rehabilitation, Orthopedics and Traumatology, Science of Acupuncture, TCM Nursing and TCM Management. This lets every graduate reach a level of sophistication in a specific area, Dang said.

Cooperation on TCM development has built up over the past 20 years and exchanges with TCM scholars across the boundary have been frequent. Universities regularly invite professors and veteran practitioners from the mainland to join seminars, said Edwin Yu Chau-leung, an honorary professor at the School of Chinese Medicine of HKBU.

Wang Huimin, president of the Hong Kong Association of Traditional Chinese Medicine (HKATCM), says they often invite Chinese medicine doctors from the mainland who specialize in oncology, orthopedics and cardiovascular diseases to hold consultations in Hong Kong.

Since it was founded in 1989, HKATCM has cultivated thousands of registered Chinese medicine practitioners. The association formed a partnership with Fujian University of Traditional Chinese Medicine in 2012, jointly designing postgraduate and doctoral degree programs. The association also employs top professors from Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine to teach, and adopts the uniform teaching materials widely used across Chinese medicine universities of the mainland.

Wang said they planned to incorporate well-established traditional Chinese therapy methods into their own study programs and set up "mobile clinics" to benefit Hong Kong patients.

Fostering Chinese medicine talents will help promote TCM culture and bring TCM products into the mainstream market. TCM experts from the mainland and Hong Kong have worked together for years to promote proprietary Chinese medicines in Western markets.

Albert Wong Bak-wai, founder of Hong Kong-based Zigen Pharmaceutical, tries to introduce quality and safe Chinese medicinal products to the international market. He also founded the Modernized Chinese Medicine International Association with a number of Hong Kong business professionals, academics and scientists.

Taking one TCM product Wong helped introduce to Canada as an example, he said the teams in Hong Kong and the mainland worked closely on the process. The medicine, manufactured by a pharmaceutical company in Sichuan province, is said to be effective against cardiovascular diseases.

Academic researchers from Sichuan with expertise in TCM were in charge of conducting clinical tests and improving the medicine's efficacy. Wong led his Hong Kong team in taking care of registration and license application.

Going global

Wong acted as a consultant offering advice to the mainland side on what supplementary documents and additional information were needed for the application. His team helped review and polish translation of all paperwork before submission to Canadian authorities, to eliminate confusion caused by misinterpretation of technical terms and jargon.

"It is hard to break into the US market," acknowledged Wong, who had worked in the pharmaceutical sector in the US for 27 years and is familiar with US regulations and policies on pharmaceutical marketing.

Theoretically, a Chinese medicine can be registered in the US either as a botanical drug or a dietary supplement. But past experience told Wong that the path of botanical medicine could lead to a "dead end" because there had only been two successful cases over the past 13 years since the botanical guidance was implemented.

If a Chinese company wants to market its proprietary Chinese medicines in the US, very likely it would register its products as a dietary supplement, because it is the easiest way to go, according to Wong.

However, medicine labeled as a dietary supplement cannot appear in local pharmacies and hospitals. But Chinese medicines that enter the US market are "camouflaged" as such, revealed Wong. "Ethically speaking, it is improper. Ethics aside, treating it as a dietary supplement seriously undermines the value of Chinese medicines and does no good to promote TCM culture internationally."

Canada has different regulations on marketing Chinese medicines. It launched Natural Health Products Regulations in 2004, specifying that Chinese medicine can be registered and sold in the country as a consumer heath product. It gives Chinese medicines due recognition in the overseas market.

"Canada is an excellent launching pad to internationalize and commercialize Chinese medicines, making it much easier to enter the US market and later the European Union," said Wong.

More cultural, academic and scientific exchange on TCM would follow. According to Wong, the deputy director of Sichuan's provincial department of science and technology showed great interest in setting up a Sichuan-Hong Kong-Canada institute specializing in TCM research.

It may take time for TCM to gain a stronger foothold in overseas markets but Wong is sanguine about the future of TCM considering the great progress accomplished over the past decades.

He is convinced Hong Kong's scientific and marketing expertise can make the city a "super-connector" under the Belt and Road Initiative between the mainland and the rest of the world, and further spread the TCM culture.

Contact the writer at

jenny@chinadailyhk.com

(HK Edition 06/30/2017 page4)