Serious Drug Abuse Within the TCM Community
An erroneous belief among ordinary people is that Chinese herbs are low in toxicity while Western drugs are highly toxic. This view is in fact wrong. The side effects of Chinese herbs can be severe; some are fatal and can kill a person quickly.
Since my mother fell ill, I have sought doctors near and far while quietly observing medical circles and patient communities, witnessing many things. Western hospitals certainly have plenty of drug abuse, but the TCM community is no better. Some TCM physicians readily prescribe harsh, drastic herbs to patients, who then die quickly; the doctor never follows up on the patient's real outcome. Or, knowing full well what happens, they conceal the true data, fabricate figures, and produce papers to help with professional promotion. Such irresponsible behavior leads other medical students to take these papers at face value, imitate them, and so drug abuse becomes widespread.
No matter how brilliant a doctor's writing may be, I no longer trust it lightly—especially when the doctor is still alive. In oncology circles I have seen a great deal and met many people. I have met patients and families whom these lofty, celebrated 'famous doctors' treated unsuccessfully, or whose treatment caused severe consequences. Gradually I lost interest in papers written by some well-known TCM professors, because their work is fabricated. Fraud in medical literature is frightening, yet in today's Chinese academic world, famous doctors who do not fabricate are probably few.
Drug abuse—using drugs that may cause severe consequences without follow-up afterward—leads some doctors to remain stubbornly attached to dogma and theory alone, turning out long, eloquent articles that the victims can only read with grinding hatred. Professor Qin Bowei once described Professor Zhao Shaoqin as 'a righteous, light, and nimble excellent physician.' I now pay close attention to that principle of righteous, light, and nimble prescribing. Especially in an age when Western medicine prevails and patients have already been greatly damaged by it, a TCM physician who abuses overly forceful drugs will only hasten the patient's death.
Some anticancer TCM case records circulating online have no verifiable basis and use enormous doses—for example, in an old Sichuan TCM physician's anticancer cases, Xishu (Camptothecae Fructus) is routinely used at 100 g and Chonglou at 50–100 g. I once imitated this and tried the herbs myself, and was nearly poisoned to death. A drug whose pharmacopoeia dose is under 6 g, scaled up to 50–100 g, has enough toxicity to kill several oxen. Such abuse will cause a great many deaths.
With toxic herbs, dose must be watched carefully; for terminal patients, toxic drugs must be used with great caution. This is extremely important. I hope medical students will not trifle with human life, that their writing will be truthful, that they will not mislead others, and that casualties caused by medical treatment will be minimized.