From Pure Chinese-Medicine Research Toward Integrative Medical Research
Many of the children with neuroblastoma who come to me for help can hardly tear their eyes away from electronic screens; some children cannot even stay away from smartphones or tablets for more than five minutes, and after five minutes they start crying and throwing tantrums.Electronic devices are one of the two chief culprits that trigger neuroblastoma; the other is alcohol—children born to parents fond of drinking are more prone to neuroblastoma. I will write separately about the adverse effects of electronic devices on the human adrenal glands and nervous system. What is certain is that frequent use of electronic devices does these children no good, yet many of their parents cannot help their children break free of the dependence on electronic devices. They often use electronic devices as electronic nannies, handing these things—which actually aggravate their children's condition—to pacify their sick children.There are also many adult cancer patients who are fond of tobacco, alcohol, or high-fat, high-calorie, high-sugar, high-protein foods. No matter how we tell them to quit smoking and drinking and cut back on high-fat, high-calorie, high-sugar, and high-protein foods, they find it very hard to change these habits.All of this is actually the doing of addictive behavior. Addictive behavior is another thorny problem closely related to cancer in cancer patients, and it belongs to mental disorders. Relying on medication alone to solve cancer patients' addiction is very unrealistic, and Chinese medicine also has no good solution to addiction. Medical specialties are divided too finely; it is an objective fact that oncologists lack research on addictive behavior.As a father and a son, in my present stage of life I bear the responsibility of caring for my son and my father. In this old man and this little boy, I have seen things that medical textbooks overlook.My father and my son also have addictive behaviors to varying degrees. My son, like the vast majority of teenagers worldwide today, is obsessed with electronic devices and the internet, while my father has some bad habits in diet and living that are very hard to correct—and bad habits, in a certain sense, are precisely a kind of addictive behavior.In the process of educating my son and caring for my father, I have been quite exasperated by their addictive behaviors. Although I know full well that these addictive behaviors have a certain harm, kicking some of them requires tremendous effort.So, do I myself also have some addictive behaviors? Objectively speaking, I do. Over these years I have been looking for my own bad habits and trying hard to correct them. But as the Venerable Master Hong Yi said after he became a monk: although one realizes one is full of faults, very few are actually changed.There is an old Chinese saying that the course of a river is easy to change but a person's inborn nature is hard to move. The so-called inborn nature, to be precise, is a series of addictive habits; some of these habits are not good ones, and some bad habits are shared by all members of a family. Because the power of environment is truly enormous, such habits are very hard to change.Yet the relationship between a person's habits and their health is no less than the relationship between genes and health; many health problems are caused by bad habits. If a doctor is committed to fundamentally changing a patient's health, he must help the patient overcome some of his already-addicted bad habits—and this is something most clinicians cannot do.Integrative medicine is a kind of medicine dedicated to achieving this very hard-to-achieve medical goal. Integrative medicine requires that the entire medical process comprehensively consider the patient's various problems, rather than merely writing out a prescription. In treating intractable diseases, medication alone is far from enough.Patients are usually not aware that they have all kinds of problems; they need the doctor's help to recognize and solve their series of problems. Every era brings new problems; traditional medicine like Chinese medicine is not enough to provide comprehensive solutions. A doctor needs a sufficiently broad range of knowledge to conduct integrative medical research.In my practice and study over these years, I have increasingly realized that even when treating only a specific disease, it is far from enough for a doctor's understanding to remain within the specialty of either Chinese or Western medicine. The patients we treat are multidimensional people; their cognitive ability, knowledge structure, beliefs, and habits are all factors we should consider when treating illness.This is also the direction I am working toward now and in the future. For a physician, learning has no end.