Cancer Patients Are Getting Younger and Younger

Several years ago, a reader followed me because of one of my articles. That article should have had nothing to do with cancer, so his purpose in following me was not to learn about cancer but to read articles on other topics.

But yesterday he came to me because his five-year-old child had been diagnosed with Wilms' tumor. The child had suddenly been diagnosed with cancer, and he was both grief-stricken and terrified. I believe that, although he had followed me for a long time and read many of my articles on TCM anticancer treatment and may have been moved by them, he still felt cancer was far away from him. But once his child was diagnosed with Wilms' tumor, his feelings were completely different.

There are more and more young cancer patients, and many people's happy lives are being abruptly cut short by cancer striking themselves or a family member. For cancer families, cancer is like a sudden period; before it appears, life may have had plenty of troubles, but never the despair that follows a cancer diagnosis. Families of young cancer patients suffer a devastating blow after diagnosis. Some post-1990s young parents have aged dramatically because their toddlers have cancer. Some parents of my neuroblastoma patients look ten or twenty years older than their age.

Epidemiological surveys show that childhood tumors like neuroblastoma are mostly related to excessive exposure to electronic products or alcohol during pregnancy. Life in our era has become inseparable from electronic products; the vast majority of people could not live without them. Even if one does not use electronic products oneself, the world around us has already become an ocean of them, and no one can escape electronic radiation.

Leukemia is somewhat related to decoration pollution. Which young person in modern society, before marriage, does not want to have the new marital home renovated? Cancers like colorectal cancer and gastric cancer, which in the past had little to do with the young, are also gradually becoming common among them. This is because young people's lifestyles are growing more and more unhealthy—high-salt, high-calorie diets, low-intensity exercise, and staying up late are destroying young bodies. Many parents count on their children to support them in old age, only to find themselves arranging their children's funerals instead.

We are paying the price humanity has paid for economic development. Producers and sellers of electronic products do their utmost to deny that cancer is related to electronic products, much as tobacco merchants once spared no effort to attack the physicians who claimed that cigarettes cause cancer. The medical community has made enormous efforts to popularize the idea that smoking is harmful to health. But as everyone knows, even after this idea has spread, smokers are still numberless, and the number of people whose cancer is caused by smoking is far higher than before. Tobacco merchants successfully opened the tobacco market, but many tobacco consumers, while generating revenue for tobacco merchants, have also paid with their lives for this bad habit. The health impact of electronic products is beyond doubt, but modern society's economic development cannot do without them; people's dependence on electronic products is even more severe than addiction to tobacco, and we are too far down this road to turn back.

I often say to my child's mother: if our child someday accepts the DINK (double income no kids) idea, we should support them in not having children. If I myself, having reached my current age and accumulated such rich experience, had not already had a child, I would absolutely not plan to have one. For one thing, I am willing to contribute to reducing the earth's population burden; for another, I feel modern society is becoming less and less suited to raising offspring.

From a biological standpoint, the speed of human physical evolution cannot keep up with the speed of human technological and civilizational development. We may soon enter an era in which robots fully replace human labor, but even then there would be little to celebrate. As our physical labor decreases, the human body is degenerating year by year. The strength of the human skeleton and the endurance of the body are both significantly weakening; overall human health has been declining in recent decades. On the other hand, with advances in medical technology, some people are prolonging—with medical help—their low-quality lives that lack dignity and joy.

Over these past few years I have been thinking about how I should live in the future. Personally, I lean toward leaving the city after my child completes basic education, returning to the countryside, and taking up farming again. If my child is willing to live the farming life with me, I would be glad to return to it together with him. If he has already been deeply trapped by modern life and cannot extricate himself, then I can only let nature take its course. He was born into this era, and many things cannot be changed.

Humanity has been kidnapped by the civilization and social systems it created. We have gradually moved away from our biological selves and become captives of the material things we made, and therefore we have had to lose our most precious health. When human muscles are no longer firm, the body grows bloated, and limbs lose agility, human lifespan and quality of life inevitably decline. Without a healthy body, how can there be an interesting soul? Human happiness is also falling.

Ten years ago, an oncologist in his eighties told me: you should not spend all your energy studying the treatment of cancer—cancer may never be curable; you should instead focus on why more and more people are getting cancer and take this social problem seriously. Now, looking back on his words, I feel they are deeply right. The more cancer is treated, the more there is; in recent years, the fastest-growing institutions in China have been cancer hospitals. Tower after tower has shot up at cancer hospitals across the country; even the hospital corridors are filled with extra beds; oncologists are busier than ever; treating cancer has become a huge industry that has enriched many people. People are like having been drawn into a vortex: in developed cities, one in three people will get cancer. These shocking figures cannot wake people up; human lifestyles have become irreversible.

Behind the high cancer rate lies a problem with our whole society: our agriculture depends more and more on pesticides and fertilizers; our industrial pollutants are increasing; our lifestyles are growing unhealthier—we eat a lot and exercise little; electronic products flood every individual's world. Minors are also becoming a high-risk group for cancer, and this mistake cannot be corrected. Is the world really becoming more and more beautiful? I deeply doubt it.