This photo, taken on November 11, shows the front of An Khang Medical Practice in Ho Chi Minh City’

Dodgy practitioners of traditional medicine are preying on the vulnerable with outrageous prices and dangerous prescriptions.

Provincial and city inspectors will check registration, medical licenses, patient examination and treatment, prescriptions, the medicines in stock and their origin, and the claims advertised by these clinics, according to Nguyen Hoang Son, deputy head of the ministry’s Traditional Medicine Department.

Son’s department says many clinics that employ Chinese practitioners charge excessively steep consultation fees and medicine prices and are guilty of dubious advertising. In some cases, the fraud is obvious.

The ministry’s instructions came after Thanh Nien had uncovered a number of unqualified practitioners of traditional medicine from China who were prescribing inappropriate and sometimes dangerous drugs, and charging through the roof for them.

It’s common for these clinics to tout their “experienced Chinese doctors” and claim they can treat ailments for which modern medicine has no answer.

In fact a great many of these “experienced Chinese doctors” are quacks that enter Vietnam with tourist visas to work in mainly Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. They have no medical diploma of any kind, let alone a license to practice traditional medicine.

Too often the patients are seriously ill and are easy prey for the vultures who charge up to ten times higher for their medicines compared to what a proper doctor would charge.

Cure worse than the disease

A man died in a HCMC hospital recently after being admitted with severe abscesses in the abdominal region.

He had been injected with some solution or other at a Chinese-practice for nearly 20 days, but his condition had worsened. His family is demanding the authorities investigate but won’t reveal what he was being treated for.

In another case, 50-year-old Tran Thi Tam was admitted to hospital in critical condition after receiving treatment for arthritis at a private practice that claimed to employ a genuine Chinese doctor of traditional medicine.

A pale Tam from Hanoi’s Thanh Tri District was taken to the National Hospital of Traditional Medicine after losing six kilograms within eight days and developing serious cramps.

The hospital’s Dr. Kieu Dinh Loan says Tam was put straight into the intensive care unit as her condition was so poor they had to leave examination and diagnosis for later.

Tam says, “My whole body turned pale and I couldn’t walk after the treatment. Everyone thought I was dying so they rushed me to hospital.”

Then there was the family in HCMC’s District 7 that developed serious sinusitis after taking medicine that a clinic on Kinh Duong Vuong Street had sold them for VND10 million (US$560).

After ten days of taking the medicine, the wife’s chest swelled up and she soon found herself in hospital.

Another disgruntled patient is Nguyen Truong Tho of Hanoi’s Ha Dong District, who shelled out VND23 million ($1,290) for a month’s supply of medicine prescribed by a clinic on Tran Phu Street before deciding the money had been wasted.

He ended up going to a public hospital, where the doctors cured his rheumatism.

Fraud

The Health Ministry’s Traditional Medicine Department says 64 Chinese practitioners have registered to work at 54 medical clinics in Vietnam, mostly in Hanoi.

Tran Huu Vinh, head of the HCMC Department of Health’s Traditional Medical and Pharmacy Section, says only five or six Chinese doctors have registered to work at traditional practices in the city.

It means that many of HCMC’s more than 1,500 traditional medicine clinics are most likely employing practitioners illegally.

Another Health Department official concurs that many unauthorized Chinese have entered the country with tourist visas to work at these clinics.

A former employee of a Chinese-owned clinic in HCMC has turned whistleblower as she wants the public and the authorities to know about these dodgy practices and the outrageous prices they charge for their snake oil.

She claims that the clinic’s main aim is to make up to VND30 million ($1,683) daily from medicine sales.

“They sell the same medicine to every unwitting patient. Often they get it from an apothecary in District 6 and mark up the price ten-fold.”

She adds that many of these scam artists are in it together and collude to bring their relatives from China to pose as qualified medical practitioners.

In a private undercover operation, a qualified traditional medicine doctor posing as a patient went to suspicious practitioners across Vietnam and found that they knew nothing about medicine and were only out to cheat their patients.

He also found that some “traditional medicine” was actually dexamethasone, a drug that can cause osteoporosis, muscle atrophy, negative protein balance, hypertension, and mental imbalances.

Slap on the wrist

When the HCMC Health Department inspected several traditional medicine clinics last week, few of the Chinese staff could produce a medical license or diploma.

Several of these “doctors” fled when the inspectors arrived at the An Khang and Trung Hoa clinics in District 5.

An Khang Medical Practice, which had been caught employing unlicensed practitioners, was also found to be employing unregistered Vietnamese practitioners when the inspectors came calling a second time.

Yet the inspectors allowed the law-breaking clinics to stay open and failed to investigate their dubious medicines.

An ex-employee of a practice in District 5 says the Chinese practitioners there always know of inspections in advance and simply wait in a nearby café until the inspectors have left.

“It seems the more they are fined, the more these places rip off their patients,” says Tran Khiet, an experienced traditional doctor who lectures at the city’s medical school.

Reported by Thanh Nien staff