Only Diligent and Persistent Exploration Bears Ideal Fruit

Many people interested in TCM hope I can point out the way for them, talk about my insights in studying TCM, and guide them to enter the field. I have politely declined, for two main reasons.

First, I myself am a half-full bottle, still in the learning stage. I have enough self-awareness to know I am not qualified to be someone's teacher or to instruct others on how to study.

Second, I have over the years encountered many TCM enthusiasts who love studying it, but who halfway through give up. Ninety-nine percent are only three minutes of enthusiasm. Medicine is dry and dull, with far too much to learn and memorize; many get sleepy just reading medical books. My time is precious, and I do not want to waste it on these TCM enthusiasts.

Kant once said a famous line: the road of a swift horse is run by the horse itself. In truth, genuine TCM practitioners also each blaze their own road of study. As long as you love TCM, have the passion, are willing to gnaw through the books, and are willing to endure hardship, you can surely blaze your own path.

Moreover, the study of medicine must rely on the sediment of time. Studying medicine—whether TCM or Western medicine—may well take ten years to truly enter the door, before one can speak of deep research. Medicine covers too broad a range; only by steadily accumulating bit by bit can a person slowly grow into a good doctor.

Though medical ethics is important, the doctor is a trade that solves disease problems; medical skill is the foundation of medical ethics. To talk of ethics without this foundation is pure sentimentalism. And the improvement of medical skill relies on day-and-night research built on reading the literature and clinical practice.

I once developed a medicine for treating brain tumors and bone tumors, used for primary or secondary tumors of the brain and bone. All along, I set its dosage at 2–3 grams per dose, and it had some effect when used on patients. By chance, one patient, in severe headache, misremembered the dosage and took about twelve grams at once; within half an hour, the severe headache stopped.

I was greatly surprised by this unexpected effect, and then successively tried a batch of cancer-pain patients, all raising the dosage to 6–12 grams. Except for one or two patients whose pain was not severe and whose effect was uncertain, all others experienced rapid pain relief.

Cancer pain is a worldwide medical challenge. To solve it, I have explored many approaches, but none has been ideal. Even the popular Western-medicine three-step analgesic ladder is not necessarily ideal in its effect; it has many side effects and its success rate is not very high.

Over the past ten-plus years, I have encountered many cancer-pain patients and tried many regimens. But none was ideal. I never imagined that such an accidental opportunity would lead me to a relatively satisfactory analgesic regimen. I will refine it to make it even more effective.

The lesson for me is that, to achieve anything in the field of medicine, one must rely on the accumulation of time and practical experience; sometimes such a discovery is an intuition sparked by accident.

I do not know on which day I will find a medicine that efficiently treats cancer. Sometimes I feel this seems an endless dark road, but perhaps one day, by another chance, I will find what I seek.

When Yang Zhenning commented on Zhang Shousheng's Nobel-level discovery, he said one thing: his discovery seemed accidental, but was actually a physicist's intuition. Anyone doing scientific exploration can produce such intuitive power only after a thousand refinements.

Time and tempering are a bend no one can bypass. There are no miracles created lightly in the world; only effort can transcend the ordinary and create miracles.

Many people may think studying TCM is easy, as if being able to read ancient prose is enough. There was once a scholar from another field who was very interested in moxibustion and explored with me the effect of moxibustion on cancer patients. I told him that the ten-thousand-hour rule applies to TCM as well; with his shallow understanding of TCM, he needed more accumulation before being qualified to conduct such research. He was perhaps not convinced after hearing this.

If every amateur, based only on a passing interest and reading a few articles, were to conduct TCM research and give conclusions that spread widely, that would by no means be a blessing for patients (in fact, our age truly does not lack such shallow yet widely-circulated articles from TCM fans). Any cursory, half-baked research can hardly truly benefit patients.

When I first studied medicine, I wanted to learn this vast discipline completely and become a great physician who syncretizes Chinese and Western medicine and can treat every disease. Later I found this idea unrealistic. With my aptitude and energy, I can only study carefully within one narrow subfield, and must devote a lifetime's effort to have any hope of producing results that can withstand the test of time and practice.

So my focus has grown narrower and narrower. The late national master of TCM, He Ren, once said that studying medicine has a process from the concise to the broad, and then back from the broad to the concise. A person's energy is very limited; the wider the focus, the shallower the learning. Only by focusing on one field and exploring diligently and persistently can one bear ideal fruit.