An important article about an online forum about breast cancer and Chinese medicine:

"Tweet: What is the standard for treating breast cancer in traditional Chinese medicine? Is the cure rate the same or different from in the west?

Dr. Chang: This is assuming that Chinese medicine has the same protocols as Western medicine. It does not. There is no standard regimen. It's not like conventional Western medicine, with a limited number of standards.

Chinese medicine depends highly on the individual practitioner and the patient. In a way there is no standard of treatment in traditional Chinese medicine for breast cancer. Therefore I think it's difficult to talk about cure rates for breast cancer in general. Maybe a response rate, but again I think the person raising the question may expect too much from medicine. I don't think we can quote a particular rate for Chinese medicine because it's so individualized. A lot of things we assume in the West like clinical trials and standardization of care do not yet exist in Chinese medicine.

Traditional Chinese medicine goes back a few thousand years and breast cancer was rare, even a hundred years ago. Cancer was rare. If you look at traditional Chinese medicine textbooks, it hardly appears. It is sometimes called, "a hardness," a "firmness," a "lump." There are whole textbooks devoted to salmonella or typhoid, but nothing on breast cancer. So, there's no standard as you would expect. It's not a disease that affected hundreds of thousands of people."

Read the entire article.