It’s been more than two years since the novel coronavirus—the pathogen that causes COVID-19—broke out in China and went on to leave a sick and deadly trail around the world. Even as people continue to be infected by emerging variants, scientists from multiple countries have begun investigating post-COVID conditions and possible remedies. While South Korea intends to conduct a large-scale investigation of the disease, traditional Korean medicine is attracting attention as a treatment.
Since COVID-19 first appeared in late 2019, the world has suffered through the aggressive Delta variant to the more infectious but less severe and deadly strain of Omicron. Now scientists are paying more attention to the long-term effects of these variants which are being referred to by a number of names including long COVID, post-COVID conditions (PCC), and chronic COVID-19.
Number One Challenge
In August of 2021, the world’s leading medical journal, The Lancet, included an article that said dealing with the long-term symptoms of COVID-19 is modern medicine’s number one challenge. The virus and its variants have the potential to debilitate millions of people. It not only impairs their daily lives but also jeopardizes their work and financial wellbeing when faced with rising medical and insurance costs.Modern medicine has yet to identify an effective treatment for the virus’s multiple after-effects. Meanwhile, many scientists are saying traditional Chinese and Korean medicines are worthy of investigation as a remedy.
Treating Patients
As the Korean government prepares to launch its post-COVID survey, the medical community there is also leaping into action. In speaking with The Epoch Times, a spokesperson for The Association of Korean Medicine said they are collecting effective treatment cases and analyzing relevant data for treatment of the post-COVID conditions.Go Seong-bae, the director of Korea’s Uekkaedongmou Oriental Medical Clinic, told The Epoch Times his clinic has been accepting patients with post-COVID conditions since April. Among the 10 patients he treated, they mostly complained about fatigue, breathing difficulties, coughing spells, indigestion, loss of appetite, and some experienced depression and memory loss. But after using traditional Korean medicine treatment, all 10 of these patients had recovered and were back to normal.
Go refers to the successful treatment he uses as a “four-phase typology” which is a theory unique to Korean medicine. It allows the diagnosis and treatment to be customized to the physique of each patient, rather than on symptoms alone. It focuses on improving the immunity of the body and restoring the body to normal.
Go gave an example of the treatment of a patient, named Wen, with serious symptoms of post-COVID conditions. Wen is a 70-year-old patient from Seoul. Prior to being infected by the epidemic in February this year, he had been in good health and was living a normal life. The severity of his infection necessitated him being hospitalized in a critical care unit.
One month after being released from the hospital, Wen was still physically weak. “He had difficulty even walking and breathing with the slightest movement,” said Go.
Wen’s treatment was customized with weekly acupuncture sessions and a month of oral herbal medicine.
According to Go, “After two weeks, the patient reported relief of the symptoms, and after one month, the patient’s condition had improved significantly and his daily life had returned to normal, allowing him to discontinue treatment.”
He said even without acupuncture, “oral herbal medicine alone is very effective.”