Is Cordyceps Beneficial for Cancer Patients?

Nearly half or more of cancer patients ask me whether they should buy some Cordyceps (dongchong xiacao, caterpillar fungus) to tonify themselves, because they have heard so many merchants promoting its miraculous effects. Moreover, when friends and relatives learn they have cancer, they give them Cordyceps as gifts, never forgetting to tell them that Cordyceps boosts immunity and can fight tumors.

Is this really so? The answer is no. Far from helping cancer patients, Cordyceps is actually harmful. In 2018, the China Food and Drug Administration issued two documents explicitly stating that Cordyceps is not a health supplement, kicking it out of the health-supplement category. The administration's 2016 spot checks even found that the heavy metal arsenic in Cordyceps and its products exceeded limits by 4-10 times. This means the Cordyceps on the market is not only unhelpful to cancer patients but actually hazardous.

Then who is claiming that Cordyceps fights cancer? Without a doubt, it is the capital speculating on Cordyceps. I often meet wealthy patients who have spent more than 100,000 yuan just on Cordyceps—it is now far more expensive than gold, costing several hundred to over a thousand yuan per gram.

Sometimes I really want to tell them: rather than spend this wasted money, donate it to children with tumors who cannot afford treatment. Over the years I have worked hard to keep the treatment cost of my pediatric oncology patients to a few hundred to a thousand-plus yuan a month, but even at such low cost many families still cannot bear it. I often watch helplessly as families give up on their children, and the anguish is beyond words. Compared with taking Cordyceps with excessive heavy metals as a tonic, perhaps doing some charity is far more meaningful.

In traditional Chinese medicine, Cordyceps is a medicinal that tonifies the kidney and lung, stops bleeding, and resolves phlegm. TCM applies it only to patterns such as kidney deficiency with essence depletion, impotence and seminal emission, soreness of the waist and knees, chronic cough with deficient panting, and consumptive cough with phlegm and blood; it can also be used for lingering deficiency after illness or spontaneous sweating with aversion to cold. Its indications are very limited. But rarity raises the price, and at some point merchants hyped its efficacy into something omnipotent, even bragging that it is a miracle anticancer drug. This is obviously wrong, and some TCM clinics also recommend Cordyceps to tumor patients.

Since I began studying medicine under my mentor, I have not prescribed a single gram of Cordyceps to a tumor patient. Even for other patients I have never prescribed it, because its effects can be fully replaced by other Chinese medicines far cheaper. Merchants often want to sell Cordyceps through my official account and offer me a commission; I ignore them entirely. Prescribing Cordyceps to treat cancer is no different from robbing a person of their money and life. How corrupt must a person's conscience be to do such a thing?

Some patients are brainwashed by certain merchants or TCM clinics and, spending tens of thousands of yuan a month, take precious medicines including Cordyceps until their families are ruined—some outrageous TCM clinics or merchants even charge over a million yuan in a few months for various precious medicines, which is especially distressing. Because I have personally encountered such cases, I very much understand and support some of the criticism of the TCM community from various sectors of society.

Cordyceps has arguably disgraced the reputation of the entire TCM industry. A TCM colleague once told me: Western medicine for tumors is expensive, but at least there is a bottom line; some black-hearted TCM practitioners are simply bottomless pits, ruining patients—selling their houses and land—by peddling precious but ineffective medicines such as Cordyceps. Of course, those who have lost benevolence are merely fraudsters who have infiltrated the TCM community; real TCM practitioners are not so wicked. I know a large number of TCM doctors who are very conscientious and would never harm their patients.