A Practical RCT of TCM in the Treatment of LCOVID and Analysis of Syndrome Types and Medication Characteristics.

About four to six Chinese medicine practitioners with five to twenty years of clinical work experience will be responsible for patient diagnosis and prescription treatment, and use a uniformly designed data collection form to record the patient's medical history, clinical symptoms and signs, tongue and pulse conditions, and other information. Patients in the treatment group will receive individualized Chinese medicine treatment prescriptions. Patients in the control group received conventional Western medicine treatment, and about 3 to four Western medicine practitioners with five to twenty years of work experience will be responsible for the conventional medicine prescription. The treatment of the two groups will last for four weeks, and the patients will be followed up for four weeks after the treatment. A patient diary will be provided to all participants for recording the drug compliance and any adverse event during the treatment period.

Western medicine doctors will mainly use symptomatic drugs to treat long COVID. For example, cough medicine (such as codeine), bronchodilators (such as ventolin), expectorants (such as fluimucil) and so on are used to treat cough, shortness of breath, or other respiratory symptoms. Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory painkillers (such as panadol) are often used for treating headaches, and sedative-hypnotic drugs (such as stilnox) are often used to treat insomnia.