The Biggest Scam In TCM: That Cancer Has Long Been Conquered By Chinese Medicine
There are now many glib talkers in the TCM world who readily use the phrase "cancer was long ago conquered by Chinese medicine" to fool patients and their families, in pursuit of their own ulterior motives. They mislead patients and their families, delay the best treatment time, and also blacken the name of genuine TCM colleagues. It is truly hateful and contemptible. I have tracked and investigated some of these charlatan figures; behind their grand boasts, patients have been treated into a sorry state and their lives shortened. The image of TCM in the eyes of the general public grows worse and worse, and this has much to do with the irresponsible talk of people who use TCM as a pretext for fleecing believers.
From ancient times to the present, the TCM classics dealing with stubborn diseases such as cancer always carry notes like "difficult to treat," "incurable," "death in XX days," "of a hundred who get it, a hundred die," or "merely dragging out the years." Anyone who reads these texts carefully will find that cancer was an extremely difficult medical problem for ancient TCM, with a very high fatality rate. The so-called cures were only a tiny handful of lucky individuals; such isolated successes can by no means become a gospel to save the great mass of cancer patients.
Medicine has been continually progressing. Decades ago, when Chinese and Western medicine joined forces to treat liver cancer, merely keeping a patient alive for a year was enough to publish a paper in a medical journal and attract colleagues' attention. Even the renowned cancer physician Dr. Sun Bingyan had more patients die than survive, and Dr. Sun always advocated integrated Chinese-Western medicine, often giving chemotherapy drugs to his patients orally. By contrast, today, thanks to the joint efforts of contemporary Chinese and Western medicine, many patients who in the past were unlikely to live a year can now live three, five years or even longer.
It is regrettable that some TCM fans who lack understanding of medicine blindly worship Chinese medicine as a divine art. Equally regrettable is the view that the older TCM is, the better—this antiquarian bias is deeply rooted in Chinese culture. The truth is that TCM has been continuously progressing, not regressing, through the long river of history. The earliest TCM was very primitive and elementary; it gradually grew as it absorbed the efforts of countless physicians and the wisdom of the folk.
If the cause of TCM is to advance, it must take a realistic and pragmatic attitude rather than relying on various "gimmicks" that mythologize Chinese medicine. There are always diehards who, on the one hand, continually lament that TCM is declining and its medical skills regressing, longing to return to the past, and on the other hand blow their own trumpets, painting TCM—and themselves—as omnipotent; only when a real patient comes for treatment do they discover they have been fooled. TCM has a very valuable auxiliary role in treating cancer, yet by no means has it solved the world's great medical problem of cancer.
TCM indeed has its value, but it is by no means omnipotent. TCM has lost out to modern medicine in reality not because of any ruler or the ignorance of the masses, but because the certainty of its efficacy is inferior to that of modern medicine. If TCM is to become part of modern medicine, give full play to its role, and serve human health, it must examine its own shortcomings, continually explore ways to improve clinical efficacy—you cannot cure patients' diseases by bragging.
Humankind's road to overcoming cancer is still very long; it requires Chinese and Western medicine to work together, explore jointly, innovate continually, and keep striving to improve efficacy, seeking new drugs and new ways out. If people with ulterior motives cheat patients by saying that TCM already solved the world's problem of cancer, it will only make TCM's image in the hearts of deceived patients grow ever worse.
Treating cancer is one of the hardest things in this world; anyone who speaks lightly of treating cancer is not to be trusted. Yet patients and their families, because they harbor fantasies, often fall into the traps these people lay and are exploited by them. I often warn my friends to be wary of the rhetoric of extremists, so-called physicians or folk miracle-workers, and not to be misled into delaying their own treatment. A truly accomplished TCM physician would never irresponsibly exaggerate and mislead patients and their families.