Do Not Take Overly Aggressive Measures Against a Tumor
Today the daughter of a patient with a renal pelvic tumor came to me for help because her father had run into an emergency while being treated for his tumor with Chinese medicine. The patient, then 74 years old, was found to have a renal pelvic tumor in October 2020 after he developed hematuria. Because of his age, he and his family did not want surgery, so they sought treatment from a folk Chinese medicine practitioner locally. Meanwhile, the family themselves also used some folk remedies they had found online. After three months of treatment, the tumor had shrunk from 4.9 x 2.3 cm to 2.9 x 1.9 cm, but the patient suddenly developed hematuria with formed blood clots in the urine. Shortly after this symptom appeared, the patient could no longer pass urine at all.
Why did this happen? It was because the medications he was taking contained high doses of herbs that activate blood and resolve stasis, which ruptured the tumor tissue. Fragments of the broken tumor tissue fell from the kidney into the ureter and blocked it. The human ureter is a very thin tube, only about 3-6 mm in diameter. If the diameter of the detached tissue or the clotted blood is larger than the ureter's diameter, these materials will completely obstruct the ureter, leaving the patient unable to urinate and, in severe cases, causing acute renal failure.
Fortunately, the family rushed the patient to a local hospital, where a doctor promptly inserted a urinary catheter to drain his urine, which prevented acute renal failure. Had the local hospital not intervened in time, this patient's life would have been in danger. In fact, as I write this article, the patient has not yet fully escaped danger.
Such aggressive treatments pursued for the sake of rapidly shrinking a tumor are extremely dangerous. Detached tissue from a kidney tumor falling into the ureter; detached tissue from hepatobiliary tumors falling into the bile duct or pancreatic duct; detached tissue from a lung tumor falling into the bronchus; and detached tissue from some tumors blocking blood vessels to form tumor emboli—all of these can be fatal.
I once saw a lung cancer patient who treated his tumor on his own with high doses of Sanqi powder (Panax notoginseng), leech (Shuizhi), and gecko (Bihu). I warned him that such treatment carried great risk. He thought I was exaggerating and suspected that I was trying to scare him into paying me for treatment. In the end, a detached cancerous fragment fell into a blood vessel and formed a tumor embolus that was not dealt with in time, and the patient died in less than three days.
When using oral Chinese medicine to treat tumors, the dosage must be carefully controlled. Some Chinese medicine practitioners relentlessly promote the benefits of high-dose medication while ignoring the dangers it brings, and many patients have suffered greatly as a result. Some also recklessly exceed safe doses when using highly toxic herbs such as blister beetle (Banmao) to treat cancer, which frequently leads to the patient's death. This kind of unsafe treatment should put everyone on alert.
Because the Chinese medicine community has traditionally frowned upon criticizing one's peers, some well-known practitioners have put forward theories with serious flaws without anyone pointing them out in time. For example, a certain deceased senior Chinese medicine practitioner spent his whole life promoting the high-dose use of aconite (Fuzi). Many people, myself included, have witnessed a great many medical accidents that occurred when he treated patients, yet to this day few have come forward to point out the harm caused by this prejudice. If such errors are not corrected, they will go on poisoning endlessly.
The key to medicine is safety and efficacy. The family of the renal pelvic tumor patient mentioned in this article lacked basic physiological and health knowledge and could not see the risks of treating the disease this way, so they paid the price. Some fans of Chinese medicine attack modern practitioners who study Western medical theory as forgetting their roots, arguing that Chinese medicine should hold fast to tradition and resist new knowledge. This kind of self-imposed isolation and arrogant ignorance is anti-intellectual. Patients and their families must exercise discernment when reading literature on their own; they should not believe exaggerated claims or ignore medical risks.