A Brainwashed Cancer Patient's Bitter Lesson: Losing Both Health and Fortune

According to a report by Jimu News on February 28, 2025, a cancer patient surnamed Zhang in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, was diagnosed at a proper hospital with a mixed tumor of the mandible. After mistakenly believing the theories promoted by Zhang, the legal representative of a local academy, he was thoroughly brainwashed. He refused needle biopsy and biopsy, and rejected any Western medical treatment, choosing instead to rely on the "pure traditional Chinese medicine" care provided by that academy's legal representative.

Starting in late September 2024, the patient took the Chinese herbal medicine prepared by Zhang. After 44 days of treatment and spending 155,000 RMB, there was no effect at all. Zhang claimed that once the herbs had expelled all the "toxins" from the tumor, the tumor would disappear. He then prescribed another 280,000 RMB worth of herbs. After taking them, the patient not only failed to improve but his condition further deteriorated, eventually leading to ulceration and necrosis that eroded through half of his face.

Finally, with no other choice, the patient went to a hospital to seek help from proper doctors and began chemotherapy, but by then the best treatment window had already been missed. His family had sold their house to pay for his care, and the outcome was this tragic.

After reading this news report, I searched the academy on Baidu (to avoid unnecessary disputes, I will not name it here; those who are interested can look it up themselves). To my surprise, the academy's legal representative turned out to be a disciple of a doctoral supervisor at one of China's top universities of traditional Chinese medicine. When the academy opened, his teacher even posted congratulations on his own Weibo account.

In this article I will not dwell too much on this incident or the people involved; I only want to discuss the phenomenon. This is something I have seen constantly over the years in the "jianghu world of TCM": many people package themselves in all kinds of disguises, hang up a TCM sign, and do similar things.

Some of these people hold a medical practitioner license, some do not; some not only hold all kinds of certificates but are genuinely TCM PhDs from prestigious universities. What they have in common is that they are extremely good at packaging themselves. The Zhang in this case, for example, not only pulled a doctoral supervisor from a famous university onto his platform but also described himself as a descendant of Li Shizhen. Of course, he has now paid a price for these actions, as the police have already stepped into the case.

Although national education in China keeps improving, the overall scientific literacy of the public is still not high, and many people are easily deceived. They readily believe the nonsense preached by certain people that TCM can easily cure major diseases such as cancer. Spending such large sums of money on treatment in a short time, they ultimately end up with nothing, losing both money and the best opportunity for comprehensive treatment.

Previously, a female bank employee in her thirties from Fujian Province consulted me after being diagnosed with colorectal cancer. I told her her cancer was at an early stage; after surgery, following a standard treatment regimen with some chemotherapy and then consolidating with Chinese medicine, her survival probability would most likely exceed ten years.

But this female patient listened to the nonsense of a rather famous TCM PhD from a Project 211 TCM university, refused all modern medical treatments, and took Chinese herbs from that PhD (the herbal fees were also extremely expensive, draining her family's savings in less than a year). Later her disease progressed beyond control, and she died in less than two years. Before she died, she contacted me, deeply regretting her earlier credulity and ignorance, and expressed her hatred toward that TCM PhD.

In my personal view, all this nonsense is beyond belief. When I was in high school, my teacher taught me that in front of those grandiose, self-appointed masters, one should remain rational and not believe them readily. My teacher told me that people with real depth are usually very plain and unassuming.

Yet in practice I repeatedly find that many people believe such talk, and no matter how much reasoning I give them, I cannot persuade them to abandon their ignorant beliefs. They do not trust basic common sense, but they believe all kinds of statements that to most people are obviously lies or fallacies.

So over time I have learned to let things take their course, knowing that many people cannot be dissuaded and must be deceived themselves, paying the price with their lives, before they wake up. This is the same feeling that many anti-fraud police officers have when persuading victims who insist on believing telecom scammers until they die: many people have to be scammed and lose money before they realize they have been brainwashed.

Lu Xun once said that TCM practitioners are intentional or unintentional frauds. I partly agree with this: there are indeed many TCM practitioners who are intentional or unintentional frauds, exaggerating efficacy and deliberately deceiving patients for financial gain. Manufacturing statements that belittle modern medicine and frightening patients are their common tricks. Of course, some of those who do this have themselves come to believe their own theories, because such people usually have little education and cannot master modern math, physics, chemistry, or biology; after picking up a few concepts from traditional Chinese culture, they really start thinking of themselves as masters.

But are these deceived patients entirely innocent? Not necessarily. I cannot say they are stupid; I can only say they are stubborn. I have dealt with a large number of such victims, and in daily communication I find it very hard to talk with them like normal people. They are narrow-minded, short-sighted, and poor at learning, yet full of self-importance. If our views conflict with theirs, they may even fly into a rage and lash out verbally. So at first I felt sorry for them, but gradually I became numb, feeling that not many in this group are truly worth pitying.

I have repeatedly called out that when you get cancer, you should choose a comprehensive treatment plan; do not resist TCM, and do not resist modern medicine either. When choosing a doctor, you should also be careful and cautious. People who charge sky-high medical bills of tens or hundreds of thousands of RMB a month—where is their basic professional ethics? If a person does not even abide by basic ethics, then not a single punctuation mark of what they say is worth believing.

Medicine is the crystallization of humanity's collective wisdom. Anyone who denies any form of medicine and excessively exaggerates the system they believe in is, in my personal feeling, problematic. A true medical learner should be humble, eager to learn, neutral, and calm. Because, to be factual, diseases are not easy to deal with at all; even exhausting all the medical methods currently known to humankind, we can treat less than half of diseases. So what is there to be arrogant about?