Does TCM Work for Cancer?

Does TCM work for cancer? This is a sharp question that arouses controversy.

On the one hand, die-hard TCM fans and some ill-intentioned medical institutions will vigorously promote and exaggerate the efficacy of TCM in treating cancer, misleading patients and ultimately causing them to miss the best window for treatment. On the other hand, extremist anti-TCM elements will denigrate TCM as worthless, calling TCM practitioners frauds; in their view, so-called TCM cancer treatment is entirely a scam.

From my many years of experience, there are indeed real cases of cancer treated successfully by pure TCM; some outstanding anti-cancer TCM physicians, such as Sun Bingyan, achieve a fairly high success rate. But cancer is by no means an easy disease to handle, and the rate at which pure TCM cures cancer is not high.

Yet TCM's involvement in cancer treatment does more good than harm for cancer patients. Numerous clinical statistics show that TCM combined with Western medicine yields a much longer survival than Western medicine alone, and a much higher probability of long-term survival. For some patients, the survival obtainable with Western medicine is far inferior to that obtainable with TCM; the efficacy of TCM for cancer patients is beyond doubt.

For some early-stage cancer patients, TCM may even offer a possibility of cure. For patients after surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy, TCM can effectively improve the after-effects of these treatments and lower the probability of recurrence. For some intermediate and late-stage patients with poor prognosis, TCM treatment can also effectively raise quality of life: the patient's strength is improved, appetite is restored, the whole bodily condition turns noticeably for the better, and survival is prolonged.

If the TCM physician the patient encounters is somewhat more skilled, with proper pattern differentiation and proper medication, the result is even better. Some patients whom hospitals have declared untreatable have, under TCM treatment, achieved long-term survival with cancer, and even had the tumour dispelled.

Generally speaking, for patients with surgical indications, I personally lean toward encouraging them to undergo surgery actively. Ancient TCM external surgery also had surgery as an option; ancient TCM external physicians were expected to be proficient in the scalpel arts - that is, to be capable of performing operations.

As early as the Three Kingdoms period, the great TCM master Hua Tuo could operate on patients. By the Ming and Qing dynasties, with the development of external surgery, TCM surgeons could already operate on many surgical diseases. For malignant tumours, most renowned TCM external physicians advocated combining surgery with herbs, moxibustion and other integrated methods.

It is only that, with the development of modern medicine, ancient TCM surgery has come to look outdated and was therefore eliminated. Eliminated along with it was moxibustion treatment, to which TCM external surgery attached the utmost importance - using moxa to treat swellings and sores. Among moxibustion methods, the riding-bamboo-horse moxibustion and the suppurative moxibustion were both aimed at yin-yang abscess-type diseases - what today we call tumours.

In addition, TCM external surgery had external plasters, encircling remedies, one-stroke-dissolving preparations and divine-lamp moxibustion, all of which have likewise been eliminated. Some genuinely effective TCM external arsenical and mercurial poison-to-attack-poison drugs were also banned because of their high risk. All of this reduced the efficacy of TCM in treating cancer.

Even so, some of today's oral Chinese patent medicines and herbal decoctions still have a certain efficacy for cancer patients. There are also external plasters, such as Awei Huapi Gao (Asafoetida Mass-Dissolving Plaster), which, when applied externally, can help shrink the patient's tumour.

For cancer patients, what matters is not waving the flag from some medical standpoint, but paying attention to actual efficacy. Any method that has proven effective after treatment should be adopted and trusted. The course of cancer treatment is long and requires integrated means; it can be solved by neither TCM alone nor Western medicine alone.