Tongrentang's Xihuang Pills Price Surge: Even Anticancer Chinese Patent Medicines Are Now Unaffordable
Recently, several of my patients told me one after another that Beijing Tongrentang's Xihuang Wan (Xihuang Pills) had risen sharply in price. What used to cost three or four hundred yuan a box, obtainable at medical-insurance designated hospitals, had suddenly jumped to 1,180 yuan.
When the first patient told me this, I thought it was just that, at the end of last year, hospitals were deliberately not prescribing it to control medical-insurance costs. Today another patient went to buy Xihuang Pills out of pocket and was also told the price had risen to 1,180 yuan.
Xihuang Wan has been one of my favorite anticancer Chinese patent medicines for many years, because this medicine does indeed have a certain anticancer effect. I once even wrote an article titled "A Detailed Account of Xihuang Wan, the Famous Anticancer TCM Medicine." I had originally planned, when I had time, to organize my experience and insights using Xihuang Wan in recent years, plus what I had gained from reviewing the literature, and write a more comprehensive article on it. But now it seems I can only abandon that plan.
At least among the patients I have encountered, the great majority cannot afford this price. This price means that, if used according to the standard dosage of Wang Weide—the famous Qing-dynasty physician who contributed the Xihuang Wan formula—a cancer patient would spend over ten thousand yuan a month on Xihuang Wan alone; adding other medicines, it would rival some imported targeted drugs. TCM's relative advantage over Western medicine in cheapness has vanished.
I can only, with a heavy heart, abandon this famous anticancer medicine I have used for ten years and explore other antitumor options for my patients. After all, not every patient can afford such high drug costs, especially since in many places Xihuang Wan cannot be reimbursed as a medical-insurance drug. Even in regions where it has been included in the insurance catalog, doctors, because of the drug-ratio issue, will cautiously avoid using such an expensive medicine.
There are more and more cancer patients, and anticancer drugs are getting more and more expensive. Any medicine with a slight anticancer effect is already pricey when it leaves the medicinal-herb wholesale market. For cancer patients, wanting to live is truly too hard.
I heard that in Japan's kampo (Chinese medicine) world there used to be an unwritten rule that doctors must not inquire about drug prices, otherwise they would easily, considering the patient's financial means, have to give up some medicines that should be used but are expensive. But in reality, if one does not inquire about drug costs and does not consider the patient's means, and writes such a prescription, how many patients can afford the treatment?
I have witnessed Xihuang Wan rise from over a hundred yuan a box to over a thousand yuan a box, a nearly tenfold increase, almost matching the rise in Chinese housing prices. Xihuang Wan will become an anticancer drug only the nobility can afford.
Developing anticancer Chinese patent medicines, lowering patient costs, and making treatment affordable when people fall ill is an urgent task. I sincerely hope that our country's pharmaceutical researchers can speed up and develop new anticancer drugs that patients can obtain and afford. Otherwise, such exorbitant drug costs will easily aggravate the already fragile doctor-patient relationship.
Goodbye, Xihuang Wan!