When Fighting Cancer, One May Stay Positive and Optimistic, but Choosing Treatment Options Must Be Rational
Nowadays many people on the Internet encourage cancer patients to have an optimistic mindset when fighting cancer, which is a good thing. But some people overemphasize the importance of an optimistic attitude, even exaggerating its effect, and that goes too far.
When people get cancer, many become frightened, tense, anxious, and depressed; for such patients it is indeed necessary to give enough encouragement so they can step out of their fear of cancer and lay down the pressure on their hearts. But another group of patients seems brainwashed by the propaganda that a positive attitude can fight cancer; they believe that relying on a positive mindset together with limited treatment or some kind of qigong practice can beat cancer, and they reject or fear standardized anti-cancer treatment—and that is very problematic.
Although standardized anti-cancer treatment is indeed not 100% effective, medical guidelines reached by doctors worldwide from clinical data are far more reliable than the conclusions of any single “master.” Patients who receive comprehensive treatment according to standardized medical guidelines have the highest overall cure rate and the longest survival.
An optimistic mindset combined with standardized treatment is the greatest guarantee of success for cancer patients. To blindly emphasize the role of a positive, optimistic attitude while neglecting standardized treatment is a kind of obsession, not wisdom. Optimism carried too far is not optimism; it is loss of reason.
Why do I write such an article to remind fellow cancer patients? Because in reality there really are many such “optimists” who believe that pure optimism alone can defeat cancer. Perhaps their relatives and friends also want desperately to ease their psychological pressure, so they keep the illness from them and, while urging the patient to be optimistic, push too hard; together with the preaching of some irresponsible people online, this leads patients, in subsequent treatment, to develop resistance to standardized and comprehensive treatment plans, ultimately causing countless tragedies.
Ms. Chen Xiaoxu, who played Lin Daiyu in the old television series Dream of the Red Chamber, made exactly this mistake: she over-believed in the effect of positive psychological suggestion on cancer, rejected standardized anti-cancer treatment, and unfortunately died young as a result.
Besides an obsessive faith in psychological suggestion, some patients also have an obsessive faith in TCM conditioning. I always advise patients to incorporate Chinese medicine within standardized treatment, rather than wholly relying on the standalone effect of TCM conditioning. But because I myself am known as a TCM physician, many patients take for granted that I am like the people they see online who advocate fighting cancer solely through TCM conditioning—and this understanding is profoundly wrong.
In practice I have seen many who claim that cancer can be cured through TCM conditioning alone; unfortunately, their actual successful cases are few, the success rate is too low, and one cannot even rule out that the successful patients were affected by the combined action of other factors (such as also receiving radiotherapy and chemotherapy). TCM conditioning has a certain meaning, but in cancer treatment, whether using Western or Chinese medicine, anti-cancer treatment is the mainstream and conditioning is only a supporting role. Reversing the importance of the two is bound to mislead patients and cause them to miss the best opportunity for comprehensive treatment.
So I hope that fellow cancer patients, while keeping an optimistic attitude, will also treat their own medical plans rationally and choose a standardized, comprehensive treatment plan without hesitation. A standardized comprehensive treatment plan is the plan with the best odds; if fighting cancer is a gamble, then this comprehensive treatment plan is the one with the best chance of winning.
Only patients who have already lost the best treatment opportunity need place their last ray of hope in the miracles of a positive mindset; all other patients should prioritize a standardized comprehensive treatment plan. And only patients with many underlying diseases and very poor function of their various organs should choose the most conservative treatment plan. Miracles do exist, but their probability is too low; pinning one's hopes on a slim miracle is very irrational.