hype

If you haven’t heard already, you will soon come across a new anti-cancer therapy called Kanglaite. It’s manufactured in China and is pushed by incredible hype and fanfares as a “proven” and “miracle” cure. But we’ve been there before, haven’t we? When commercial interests get on the bandwagon, the inconvenient matter of truth and integrity suddenly gets lost in all the brouhaha. So what are the facts? Kanglaite was developed by a pharmacist, Li Dapeng. It is made from a plant called Job’s tears, a relative of maize. We might think of it as “Chinese pearl barley”. The botanical name, for those interested, is Coix lachryma-jobi. Its Chinese name, yi-yi-jen, or yi-mi (in southeast China) is the same as that used for barley, or yang-yi-mi, ‘yang’ meaning ‘foreign’, or ‘across the ocean’. Yi-mi is used in soups and gruel and is a common ingredient in many Chinese traditional herbal medicines for treating a variety of ailments including cancer. It has also been widely used as a diuretic, analgesic and antispasmodic agent. No one knows exactly how Kanglaite works, but the drug has been taken by more than 270,000 patients in some 2,000 hospitals in China, and has proven effective against malignant tumors such as carcinomas in the lung, liver, stomach and breast. So far so good.

If you haven’t heard already, you will soon come across a new anti-cancer therapy called Kanglaite. It’s manufactured in China and is pushed by incredible hype and fanfares as a “proven” and “miracle” cure. But we’ve been there before, haven’t we? When commercial interests get on the bandwagon, the inconvenient matter of truth and integrity suddenly gets lost in all the brouhaha. So what are the facts? Kanglaite was developed by a pharmacist, Li Dapeng. It is made from a plant called Job’s tears, a relative of maize. We might think of it as “Chinese pearl barley”. The botanical name, for those interested, is Coix lachryma-jobi. Its Chinese name, yi-yi-jen, or yi-mi (in southeast China) is the same as that used for barley, or yang-yi-mi, ‘yang’ meaning ‘foreign’, or ‘across the ocean’. Yi-mi is used in soups and gruel and is a common ingredient in many Chinese traditional herbal medicines for treating a variety of ailments including cancer. It has also been widely used as a diuretic, analgesic and antispasmodic agent. No one knows exactly how Kanglaite works, but the drug has been taken by more than 270,000 patients in some 2,000 hospitals in China, and has proven effective against malignant tumors such as carcinomas in the lung, liver, stomach and breast. So far so good.