Early COVID-19 Is a Cold Syndrome; Wind-Heat Cold Remedies Will Only Worsen the Condition

Doctor zhou December 21, 2022

The many symptoms brought on by Omicron, together with my own clinical experience, show that the disease now caused by COVID-19 is a cold (han) syndrome, not a wind-heat cold. I am writing this article to remind readers not to misuse medicines designed to treat wind-heat colds.

Especially at the very onset of illness, abusing wind-heat cold remedies at this stage will only make things worse. After a cold syndrome lingers for several days, it can indeed transform into heat, but from what I have observed in practice, that proportion is not high. Far more common is the great harm done by mistakenly taking wind-heat drugs from the very beginning.

The COVID-19 patients I have seen, whether from the south or the north, have basically had the same symptoms: at the onset, chiefly aversion to cold and body pain, followed by fever, and most people cannot sweat. Some patients develop cough and sore throat; others do not.

In Chinese medicine, this is a typical Taiyang cold-damage (shanghan) syndrome, for which the acrid-warm exterior-releasing formulas Mahuang Tang and Gegen Tang work best. Those with accompanying cough and wheezing are best treated with Xiao Qinglong Tang. If no medicine is available, the natural heat-therapy sweating method I recommended previously can achieve the same effect as medication—for free. I myself used a hairdryer blowing hot air into the bedding to bring my son fever down.

It is lamentable that China team of TCM experts actually recommended using wind-heat cold remedies and promoted it with the full force of the state; the harm will be endless. Beijing has been hit hardest by this wave. Baidu epidemic index shows that in Beijing, searches for Lianhua Qingwen, a wind-heat cold drug, rank first.

A flood of severe cold-syndrome patients, who desperately needed acrid-warm herbs to save their lives, instead scrambled to take the bitterly cold Lianhua Qingwen. After taking it, their conditions worsened, and they queued for treatment shivering in the cold—with the result that Beijing major hospitals are now full to the brim with severe cases.

Is this really caused purely by the epidemic itself? We ought to ask ourselves whether an element of human error is at play here. Many severe patients, had they not been doused in wind-heat drugs from the start but simply drunk a bowl of ginger-scallion tea at home to induce sweating—or followed me in blowing hot air from a hairdryer into the bedding to promote sweating and lower the fever, or soaked their feet and drank hot water to sweat out the fever—would never have progressed to such a serious state.

When the outbreak first erupted in Wuhan in 2019, Dr. Zhang Jixian, director of the Department of Respiratory and Critical Care at Hubei Provincial Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine—the first person to report the epidemic to the state—recently stated publicly that her own family treated this wave with scallion-white and ginger-shred soup, with excellent results.

The COVID-19 virus has indeed been mutating over these three years, but no matter how it mutates, judged by its clinical symptoms through the lens of TCM pattern differentiation, it is always a cold syndrome, not a heat syndrome. Among the patients I saw three years ago and those I see now, over 90% present chiefly with aversion to cold and body pain. Whether it strikes in winter or summer, acrid-warm exterior-releasing formulas work well.

My father fever broke after a single dose of Mahuang Tang, truly embodying the TCM ideal of recovery as soon as the cup is set down. Some elderly Beijingers around me rushed to buy up all kinds of wind-heat cold remedies, took them after falling ill, and saw their fever rise rather than fall. In the end they still had to run to the hospital, queuing to see doctors in this bitter-cold weather.

Three years into the pandemic, China TCM community is full of talent—could it really have gotten such a basic pattern differentiation wrong? I see plenty in the TCM world who hold that COVID-19 is a cold syndrome, and a great many doctors are treating it as such, with striking results. I do not know why, but these TCM voices cannot become the mainstream, while the power of the state promotes treating it as a wind-heat cold. Heading in the opposite direction of what is needed—the result can only be a cause for deep regret.

My voice is faint, but I still want to raise it. Once restrictions were lifted, COVID-19 will long coexist with us, and everyone may be reinfected repeatedly in future. What is past cannot be advised on, but what is to come can still be grasped. If we can correct this error in time, we may be able to help patients better in the future.

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