Do You Need a Doctor, or Are You Just Looking for a Formula?

Patients often ask me whether a formula published in my articles, or one they dug up from somewhere else, is suitable for them. I suppose other doctors get this all the time too.

For patients I have not examined in person, I simply have to leave the questions unanswered.

First, because it is very bad for the asker: treating illness in TCM requires taking the pulse and a detailed face-to-face inquiry; I myself often spend about an hour understanding a patient's situation before I dare prescribe. To give medication advice on the basis of a hasty question would harm the patient.

Western medicine too requires definite examination results before daring to treat the cause; otherwise medical accidents would occur every day.

Besides, I truly have too many patients, and I also plan to write medical articles and monographs (I do not want to take a lifetime of clinical experience into my coffin when I die); my workload is already heavy. So I have neither the time nor the energy to answer such questions.

Looking for a formula to fit the disease is, half of it, a blind act born of patients' lack of basic medical knowledge; the other half is that some patients are simply not very willing to pay to see a doctor.

Today, for many people in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, spending several hundred to a thousand-plus yuan on a meal with a few friends is no big deal, but spending a little to see a doctor feels like a sacrifice.

I understand: the cost of seeing a doctor today is indeed painful. Nor can I pretend to be lofty and say I do not earn money from patients; if I earned nothing, what would my whole family eat?

As a result, many people like to hunt for formulas and treat themselves via Baidu.

It is true that quite a few people have actually cured their own diseases through Baidu, but what is even more striking is that in China hundreds of thousands die every year from drug misuse. You can look all these figures up on Baidu yourself.

In a year I probably encounter two to three hundred patients who have developed serious side effects from moxibustion and the misuse of Chinese herbs and come to me for help.

In fact, apart from some low-side-effect drugs for relatively minor illnesses that one may try oneself, for everything else one should seek guidance from reliable professionals.

Some critically ill patients also hope to solve their problems by getting a bit of online advice and then taking medicine; this is a very serious problem.

Reckless people sometimes give these askers irresponsible advice, and very often such advice puts the patient's health and life at risk.

A doctor treats illness trembling with fear, as if standing at the edge of an abyss, as if walking on thin ice; because what we face is nothing other than a living human life.

Mistreatment that kills a patient can easily bring disaster on oneself; some emotionally agitated families may beat or even kill the doctor. Even if the family does not pursue responsibility, the doctor's own heart is full of fear.

So over the years I have become more and more cautious and careful in treating illness. Not for any other reason, but because the grim state of doctor-patient disputes does not let me take it lightly. Life is supremely precious; when one's own flesh and blood dies, the family develops a doctor-hating psychology, which I can understand.

Patients trust doctors and entrust their lives to them; only after the doctor has examined the patient face to face, even met the family, understood the patient's condition in detail, assessed the patient's stamina, assessed the treatment risks, and explained the condition, prognosis, and treatment costs to the patient and family, can medication advice be given.

As for deciding on one's own not to see a doctor and just use a formula, that is a matter of bearing the consequences oneself; which doctor would dare take that thunder for the patient, making an irresponsible judgment?

So I hope, patient friends, that you decide clearly whether you are looking for a doctor or just a formula. If you want a doctor, then earnestly seek medical care. If you only want a formula, then judge for yourself whether it suits you, and stop making things difficult for the doctors.

WeChat public account: zhouzhiyuan360 (or search for "周志远")

Author's website: www.zhouzhiyuan.com

Author's WeChat: zhouzhiyuan1979 (or: 36641)