What Matters in Chinese Herbs Is Efficacy, Not Price

The prescriptions I write are mostly inexpensive. This has to do with my peasant background; the patients I see are mostly among the urban poor. Sometimes, going home and seeing fellow villagers who cannot even afford cheap medicine, I teach them to identify wild herbs so they can gather and use them themselves, rather than going untreated.

But this prescribing principle is hard for some city patients, used to high medical spending. When a dose of my herbs costs only one or two yuan, patients begin to mutter at the pharmacy: can something this cheap really cure disease? Even when it works, they doubt: did this medicine really cure me?

Some patients would rather pay high prices to swindlers selling "secret formulas" than take such cheap herbs. The reasoning is simple: they believe cheap herbs cannot cure disease.

Taking medicine is not buying clothes—you do not always get what you pay for. Medicine need not be expensive to cure; it must be the right medicine. What is truly precious in healing is the doctor's skill, not the drug. When my family has the onset of a cold, I usually buy twenty or thirty cents' worth of淡豆豉 (fermented soybean) from the pharmacy, boil it with some scallion whites into a soup, drink a bowl, cover up and sleep, and it is done. Simple, convenient, cheap. More expensive medicine is available if you want it, but if there is no need to take expensive medicine, why spend?

Some "filial sons and daughters," treating their parents, insist on fighting money: spending little makes them anxious, but does spending more really cure a parent's illness? Does spending more prove filial piety? How strange. No wonder the ancients said, "Not to understand medicine is to be unfilial."

Some patients with complex conditions also believe that health can only be bought with money, feeling at ease only after spending ten or eight thousand. This is the inertial thinking left by the bad habits of the modern medical industry.