As a TCM Practitioner, Why Do I Criticize Chinese Medicine?

Few people love TCM as deeply as I do, yet I frequently criticize it, drawing streams of abuse from TCM colleagues and fans. But this does not affect my attitude of critically inheriting TCM. For the rest of my life, I will study TCM diligently and treat patients, and I will continue to criticize TCM as always—even more deeply and fiercely.

TCM, as an ancient medicine, has powerful vitality, but it also contains too much dross. I want my readers to understand that TCM has its useful side and its harmful side. Whether studying TCM or seeking TCM treatment, we should take the benefits and remove the harms, neither blindly believing nor blindly following. We should treat TCM correctly, using it to restore health, but never ruin our bodies by superstitious belief in it.

The medical profession has many dark sides, and always has. Beyond those arising from malice, there are dark sides arising not from intent but from insufficiency. In TCM, this insufficiency is reflected in many impractical aspects of its theory and in major flaws. Medical students who blindly believe them become muddle-headed; patients who blindly believe them may be injured or, in severe cases, killed.

Many flawed TCM concepts have been entrenched in Chinese minds for over two thousand years, and removing this harmful ideological toxin is not easy. Some patients I have encountered are superstitious about the backward side of traditional culture, clinging to entrusting their lives to irresponsible, shaman-like healers; most, after a year or so, reach a point where their disease is advanced and untreatable, with no way back. Alas! Conservative thought must eventually be paid for with the pain of losing one's life, and the price is too high. Tragically, this tragedy keeps repeating.

I have been in cancer circles for ten years, and in those ten years I have seen far too many bloody, unnecessary deaths. The patients I encountered paid with their lives, making me deeply feel how right the famous saying is that ignorance is a disaster star. This often sticks in my throat like a fish bone until I spit it out.

I come from a medical family. My great-uncle on my father's side was a folk herbalist; my father inherited some of his skills, but my father never read the *Huangdi Neijing* or *Shanghan Lun*. The herbs he used were not the ones sold in pharmacies, but plants he gathered himself from fields and roadsides, some without formal scientific names. When my father treated illness, often the patient was cured by the next morning after taking the medicine that evening—the results were rapid and reliable. For certain conditions, like surgical swelling and pain or acute throat disorders, I never saw him fail once; the reproducibility of his efficacy is beyond doubt. But this kind of country doctor has always been looked down upon by formal TCM physicians, even though in terms of efficacy, formal TCM doctors sometimes are not fit to tie his shoes.

When I studied medicine, I took a different path—apprenticing, reading classics, studying various medical theories and diagnostic methods, following my teachers in clinical practice, and observing TCM masters at work. Through years of silent study, I quietly followed the results of many famous TCM physicians, only to discover that neither I nor those so-called masters, when treating according to TCM's various theories of pattern differentiation, achieved results as certain and rapid as my father's.

I gradually came to understand why Lu Xun called TCM, wittingly or unwittingly, a fraud. The universally low clinical efficacy is an undeniable fact in TCM; raising clinical efficacy is the only path to TCM's survival and development. And to raise clinical efficacy, should we not question our current medical theories? If these theories were truly so advanced, why is it that so many TCM doctors cannot achieve clinical efficacy above 30 percent?

I am a pragmatist. For a theory to convince me as truth, it must demonstrate its universality. Otherwise I can only regard it as a partially correct, partially wrong hypothesis—and a hypothesis need not be clung to so dogmatically. Western medicine also has the problem of uneven efficacy, but Western textbooks at least have the virtue of directly labeling theories whose efficacy cannot be confirmed as hypotheses. In TCM, when someone questions yin-yang and five elements, six-meridian differentiation, triple-burner differentiation, or zang-fu differentiation, a mob of TCM fans swarms in, cursing the questioner as an idiot, a moron, or a cultural traitor. The low quality displayed in their abuse is shocking.

Our society does not value reasoning; it valued taking sides. People decide whether they like or dislike you not by whether your argument is sound, but by whether you stand on their side. On their side, even if you talk nonsense, they cherish you. Not on their side, even if your evidence is conclusive, they will foam at the mouth and wish to cast you into the deepest hell.

The lack of independent rational thinking and the tendency to form superstitious attitudes toward our national heritage are the most distressing common failing of our people. As a writer of critical essays, I feel this deeply. The abuse I will endure in my life will by no means be limited to what is before me now, because I cannot stop writing, cannot stop expressing my views, and my views constantly offend various immortals, masters, and loyal fans of traditional culture. So I must steel myself to be reviled.

Society progresses; thought should be liberated. A nation under too much constraint is still at a low level of civilization. I hope in my lifetime to see our Chinese nation rise to a higher level of civilization. Toward our national heritage, I maintain a stance of critical inheritance. I believe that only through critical inheritance, expanding ancient meaning and integrating new knowledge, and raising clinical efficacy, can TCM generate new and more vigorous life. The public should also keep pace with the times and not lose their health and lives because of superstitious belief in quasi-metaphysical concepts.

I study medicine only by results, working tirelessly to improve clinical efficacy, and nothing else concerns me. A physician's highest medical virtue is superb skill that can rescue the patient—what else is there?