Reflections on the Cixi Health Bureau's Post Encouraging People to Study Medicine

On July 2, 2025, the Cixi Health Bureau's official account posted an article titled "The Gaokao Is Over; It Is Time to Persuade People to Study Medicine," and this post went viral online.

The article read: Sorry, medical students, one medical textbook after another vows to train you into a cultured person; sorry, the social partners you expected are in fact the cadavers of the anatomy lab; sorry, exam month makes you relive the gaokao, surpass your limits—this life-or-death specialty has no key points, yet everywhere is a key point; sorry, you may also face doubts and complaints from patients... But this city of medicine is worth your shouldering the burden! Yes, we want to say thank you: the nights you stayed up, the sweat you shed, the knowledge you memorized until weeping will become your most powerful "weapon," turning you into a fighter who snatches people back from the hands of death. Sorry, medical students, we have ruined your easy university dream, but thank you for keeping the fortress of human health forever impregnable.

At the same time, Cixi city also issued a series of policies supporting medical students. Back in 2023 Cixi issued the "Several Opinions on Strengthening the Training and Recruitment of Health Talent," stipulating that from that year on, the first 50 Cixi-registered students formally admitted into in-demand medical majors at "985"/"211" universities would receive a government grant of 20,000 yuan per person per year, and the first 100 Cixi-registered students admitted to medical majors at "985"/"211" and other universities' first batch would receive a grant of 15,000 yuan per person per year.

The reason for all this is that Cixi's health sector badly lacks talent. The Cixi Health Bureau stated that a shortage of health technical personnel is widespread across provinces, cities, and regions in China. Cixi, like elsewhere, sees its health-talent gap widening year by year, and, owing in recent years to stepped-up capital construction of medical institutions and the small number of students applying to medical schools, the gap continues to widen. "Talent shortage" and "recruitment difficulty" have become the two bottlenecks constraining local health development; the background for Cixi's policy is precisely to ease this dilemma.

Reading this article, I felt quite a lot. After this year's gaokao, several parents consulted me about filling in preferences, because their children also took the exam this year. Several children flatly stated they would absolutely not apply to medical majors. Last year, after my nephew's gaokao scores came out, the family discussed preferences with him, and he also told his parents very firmly that he would absolutely not apply to medicine. My own son took the gaokao in 2023, scoring over 600; when filling out preferences, he also flatly refused any medicine-related major.

Why are so many people now afraid of studying medicine, to the point that health technical talent is so scarce? The Cixi Health Bureau's article is written with great feeling, but reality is actually rather harsh. Studying medicine is not only exhausting; being a doctor or nurse also carries very high risk, and that risk is growing fiercer. Patients and their families feel toward doctors by no means only doubt and complaint; some even harbor hatred and harm.

In recent years doctor-patient disputes have grown explosively, and the great majority, when finally settled, are judged to be unreasonable disturbances by patients and families—because they do not understand medical uncertainty and hold rigid, obsessive ideas, and forensic assessment by the Health Commission does not support those ideas. But such a verdict does not end the dispute. What medical staff fear most is not patients and families complaining to the Health Commission or police; what we fear is the ever-escalating emotionalism of patients and families, whose highly emotional endgame may be a fatal incident. No matter how severely state agencies act, they will not pay with a life.

I have a martial-uncle who lived through such an event. He encountered a patient's family stirring up a dispute; at the time he felt he was in the right whether they went to the Health Commission or the police, so he was not afraid of them going through the process. After the process ended, the patient and family had not achieved their preset aim and grew angrier, then launched a series of frantic private reprisals. Later the hatred between the two families deepened, with mutual retaliation, and the final result was that both families paid with deaths and injuries.

The martial uncle's life was ruined; all of us fellow-disciples in my master's lineage take this as a warning. Our current principle in handling doctor-patient disputes is to settle things amicably at the first moment while keeping absolute isolation from the patient and family, avoiding renewed contact that might trigger new emotional incidents. Because disease sometimes brings a family torment so painful that some people lose their reason and take extreme measures. This is understandable, but its consequences are dreadful.

Every perpetrator of the vicious doctor-harming incidents reported in recent news may have faced not only disease but multiple predicaments—family crisis, financial crisis, emotional crisis, even legal crisis. When a person is squeezed by multiple predicaments and their mood reaches rock bottom, they fight like a trapped animal. The warning my martial uncle gave us is: yield three points and you are calm; step back a pace and the sea and sky open up. Of course, he would rather we simply not study medicine at all and take another road.

I have over five hundred medical people in my WeChat contacts—fellow disciples, colleagues from when I apprenticed and worked in hospitals, and peers I met at work and online. Many regularly complain to me about how they tread on thin ice. Even I myself now feel this way. Because my own mother had cancer and a stroke, I specialized in researching those two diseases; when I took the TCM specialty physician exam, I chose this direction. But what I want most now is to shift to integrated Chinese-Western general practice, treating all sorts of minor ailments, and no longer touch any major disease—at least not accept major-disease patients outside my circle of relatives and friends. I think in five or ten years I will complete this shift and no longer bear such pressure.

I still love studying medicine, but increasingly I do not want to make being a doctor my career. My ideal model is, after training, to become a health consultant for relatives and friends, practicing among people close to me rather than serving outsiders whose background I do not know; I have over a thousand friends who support me in this. I know this idea is selfish, but in fact many colleagues think the same way now. This model is the family-doctor model abroad: the doctor becomes the family doctor of households they are close to, maintaining both a good doctor-patient relationship and a close friendship—such a work model is relaxing.

As a child I most envied the village doctors, who knew every patient and family thoroughly, handled doctor-patient relations harmoniously, had no medical disputes, and did not bear such great occupational pressure. But today's doctors, especially those in big hospitals, are strangers to their patients and families and never know when an accident will occur.

Now many doctors have "laid flat," staying as far as possible from patients and families with emotional problems and not stepping on such landmines. Some have taken up side jobs, some even doing better in their side line than their main work. In fact, not only our relatives and friends need doctors; the general public needs doctors. But a catchphrase now circulates in medical circles: "Persuade someone to study medicine, and heaven will strike them with lightning." This is very bad; all of us should find ways to improve doctor-patient relations, improving patients' access to care and doctors' working environment at the same time.

During Japan's economic downturn, there was a period when doctor-patient relations deteriorated so severely that large numbers of doctors fled clinical work, and the country finally suffered a doctor shortage. A few days ago I went to the Air Force Characteristic Medical Center and saw written at every consultation room door: "Recording is not allowed in the consultation room." This shows that many patients record visits, ready at any time to take the recording out of context and report the doctor; Academician Zhong Nanshan once admitted he is often recorded by patients. This is a sorrow: lacking mutual trust between doctor and patient, the malignant diseases that can kill people are even less likely to be treated properly.

When I fill out my preferences this year, I will of course choose medicine without hesitation; after all, the sole purpose of my gaokao is to study medicine. Even with no one encouraging me, I would still study medicine. Even if I meet setbacks, I will unswervingly walk the medical path to the end. I also hope more people will study medicine, so that in future the medical cause develops better and everyone's life is guarded—rather than everyone fearing medicine, so that later everyone has trouble seeking care. That would harm not only others but our own relatives and descendants too; who can guarantee that they and their family will never fall ill?