How a Patient Survives—When Medicine Cannot Help Us

There are many illnesses that medicine cannot solve. Neither modern medicine nor traditional medicine can solve all disease problems; there are always medical puzzles beyond what any doctor can solve. As patients, how can we live relatively better when medicine cannot solve our problems?

In this article I speak from the standpoint of a patient, not a physician, about a survival strategy for the sick.

From birth I was less healthy than the average child. As a boy I wet the bed until the age of seven or eight, and later I developed chronic urinary frequency. Because my parents had gone out to work early to earn money to put my two siblings and me through school, from junior high onward I was a "left-behind child," lacking my parents' care; when I fell ill I had to find my own way.

Around the first year of senior high, a cold I failed to treat in time developed into pneumonia. The barefoot doctor in our village gave me ofloxacin injections for a long stretch, and from then on I coughed continuously. To this day, at forty, it has never been fully rooted out. In my twenties it also developed into asthma.

Cough and asthma are tormenting. Because of this illness I saw every expert in Beijing who treats cough and asthma, large and small—among them many academician-grade masters of both Chinese and Western medicine—but not one solved my problem. At twenty-five I was coughing and wheezing almost twenty-four hours a day and could not sleep at all. My son was still in the womb then, and the child's mother felt our future was so bleak that she very much wanted to die with me.

It was precisely in such desperate straits that I had to turn to the vast collection of medical books in the National Library. I buried myself in studying medicine to solve my own problem. In the end the problem was markedly relieved after I adopted some methods that may sound rather absurd: I used hot towels to apply heat to my chest and back, insisted on doing all sorts of chest-expanding exercises every day, and tried every means to improve my sleep. After that I was free from cough and asthma for about fifteen years.

If it had not been for a recurrence over the past year or so—brought on by too many patients and excessive fatigue—I would almost have forgotten that I am a cough-and-asthma patient. Long-standing cough and asthma invariably progress to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and COPD ranks among the top three causes of death in humans.

I am also a carrier of the hepatitis B virus. At the physical examination before the college entrance exam, I was unfortunately told that I was a "small three-positive" hepatitis B carrier. Hepatitis B is also an unsolved medical problem worldwide. Moreover, roughly one in three hepatitis B patients eventually dies of cirrhosis or liver cancer.

In my twenties, just as my career was rising, my mother successively suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and stomach cancer. In the years that followed, one of the main themes of my life was caring for my mother, taking her everywhere to seek doctors, reading extensively through both Chinese and Western medical classics myself, and striving to ease her suffering and prolong her life.

I was once the top science student at my school; in my student days I could top the school in every single subject, and I also ranked among the leaders when all of Hubei Province held joint examinations. A student of such balanced high achievement is rare, and for a long time I had great confidence in modern science.

It was only when my own problems, my mother's, and my asthmatic teacher's wife's problems could not all be solved by medicine that I deeply felt how insignificant humans are, and how truly limited our powers are.

When people are healthy they have many dreams. But when they lose health, they have only one dream—to live healthily, to live a bit longer.

Along the way of seeking doctors I also came to know many fellow patients and patients' families. Ever since I began being treated for asthma, I have been following the Chinese and Western treatments for asthma, and I have watched the treatment journeys of my fellow patients.

I am the only one among them who controls his condition very well without hormone therapy, relying solely on natural methods; my physical condition is the best in that group of fellow patients. Because of long-term hormone use, most of them have all sorts of problems. I have an unkind thing to say about Chinese and Western medicine: for certain diseases, whether Chinese or Western, treatment may be worse than no treatment.

As a patient I am a bit more rational than the average patient. After the initial treatments failed, I decided to give up treatment and instead chose to coexist with the disease.

I began to look for the factors that trigger my cough and asthma and overcame them one by one. Lack of sleep worsens my cough and asthma, so I go to bed early and get up early, and I also take a nap every day. Certain irritating smells worsen my cough and asthma, so I avoid all sorts of irritating odors, do not smoke, firmly refuse to stay around smokers, and keep away from choking environments. Fatigue causes me to cough and have chest pain, so I regulate my own work pace, give up material desires, and whenever my workload exceeds what my body can bear, I firmly reduce it, putting my health first. Air conditioning triggers a relapse, so I stay away from it....

By attending to such details one by one, relying entirely on medication-free control and modestly combining hot compresses and exercise, I have actually managed to stay in long-term remission. As the saying goes, "three parts treatment, seven parts nourishment"; I practice "one part treatment, nine parts nourishment." Except for taking a little herbal tea when symptoms are particularly severe, I use almost no medicine.

As a hepatitis B patient, I know that taking too much medicine will surely harm my liver and bring on cirrhosis or liver cancer sooner, so I avoid medication as much as possible. Over the years I have rarely caught a cold; I have truly put the Chinese medicine idea of "treating pre-disease" into my life, putting prevention first. Fortunately I have muddled through to the age of forty, and my body remains robust. Though not as strong as an ox, I still do not lose to most of my peers.

When I was a child living in the countryside, every autumn at harvest my father would cut down a patch of the best-growing rice in the paddy and save it as seed to plant the next year (we people in Huanggang call the field specially used for breeding seedlings "yang-li"). After the grain sprouted, my parents would often go into the seedbed to pull out the weeds and the weak seedlings. Once the seedlings reached a certain size, they had to be pulled out of the seedbed and transplanted into the main paddy.

This seemingly simple process is the secret of how humans domesticate plants. That rice has become ever more high-yielding and palatable is thanks to farmers' seed-selection technique. In short, this selection technique is the survival of the fittest.

We humans, living in the natural world, are likewise subject, in the unseen, to a "hand of God" that selects the fittest; those with poor genes are eliminated by nature. Only in this way does the human species improve generation by generation, ever better suited to long-term survival in nature.

A person like me, frail from birth, is essentially a candidate nature intends to eliminate, because our bodies are not strong enough.

But genes decide only half; the other half depends entirely on our own wisdom.

The great ancient physician of our country, the Medicine King Sun Simiao, was in poor health as a child; it is said his family went from door to door seeking doctors for him and was finally reduced to utter poverty. Yet Sun Simiao lived to a great age and became a great physician of his generation. Historians dispute whether Sun Simiao actually lived to be over 120 or a little over 100, but it is certain that he lived past 100.

The late Professor Zheng Ji of Nanjing University underwent a major operation in his sixties and nearly died of postoperative complications. Yet this founder of Chinese nutrition also lived to a great age, dying at 111. That Professor Zheng Ji reached such an advanced age was also related to the rich nutritional knowledge and medical common sense he possessed; it is said that he long supplemented himself with multivitamins and simultaneously took health-promoting foods such as goji berries and red dates.

Earlier I came across a report interviewing a breast cancer patient in Nanning who had passed 100. The patient said that if she had not gotten cancer she would absolutely not have lived to be over a hundred; precisely because she lost her health, she paid special attention to protecting her body, and her efforts let her reach a ripe old age.

Heaven may not have given us a good body, but as long as we ourselves stop abusing it, perhaps even those of us with illness can live to a great age. Genes decide only half; the other half lies in our own hands.

If medicine cannot help with many of our problems, let go of the illusion about medicine and learn to coexist with the various problems in our bodies, trying not to aggravate them—do not use violent emotions or extreme measures to stimulate the progression of our disease. Then, even if our bodies have some faults, they need not progress to a life-threatening degree.

I have forgotten that I am a urinary-frequency patient—people often tell me, "Dr. Zhou, I get up several times a night to urinate, it's so worrisome!" I want to tell them that on rainy nights I may get up ten or twenty times. But I have grown accustomed to my body's condition and no longer pay attention to it or worry about it.

I once tried many doctors and tried many treatments myself, none of which helped much, so I simply gave up treating it and came to regard it as normal.

I have also forgotten that I am a COPD patient. When I am wholly absorbed in reading, or wholly absorbed in writing, the symptoms—whether cough and asthma or urinary frequency—seem to disappear.

I no longer make a fuss about my hepatitis B, but I also do not stay up late, drink, or smoke to damage my body.

I free myself as much as possible from every bond of the system, return myself to a state of freedom, and then let my own body decide my workload. If my body can bear a certain workload, I do that much; if for a while my body cannot bear it, I rest.

I have had two episodes of alopecia areata (spot baldness), at a time when work pressure was greater than now. I quickly adjusted my work pattern, modestly took some Fuling (Poria) and Erzhi Wan, and my alopecia resolved, never to return.

My own experience of, as a patient, seeking doctors everywhere has taught me that the role medicine can play is truly very limited. I have never favored Chinese medicine, nor have I ever favored Western medicine. But neither the famous Chinese and Western experts I sought, nor the folk masters, could solve my problems. What expectations can I still have of Chinese or Western medicine?

After I studied medicine myself I learned that there are many diseases that medicine simply cannot solve. The medical knowledge I acquired only helps me, when my disease acutely flares, to ease my condition a little; recovery relies on non-medical means, and protecting my body relies on the rules of my body's responses to the environment that I have discovered from the smallest details.

The Medicine King Sun Simiao never fully solved his own problems even at death; Li Dongyuan, one of the four great masters of the Jin-Yuan period, never solved his own problems either. But this did not affect their longevity in the least.

For the past six months my father, back in his hometown, has suffered recurrent constipation. Seeking doctors everywhere, the more he was treated the worse his constipation became, and no amount of my advising him not to take medicine randomly helped. As his condition worsened he grew more and more depressed and irritable, worrying all day long about his constipation.

Out of helplessness, I brought my father to live with me and care for him, strictly forbidding him to use any laxative. I only supplemented him with probiotics and yeast enzymes and had him eat various laxative foods: onions, shiitake mushrooms, water chestnuts, century eggs, leafy greens, and so on.

I prepared only one enema device and told my father that if constipated one day, he should use it to administer warm water or coffee to open the bowels. Under no circumstances was he to take medicine. After more than a week of such care, his bowels moved freely and he could have a normal bowel movement every day.

Because I know that many of those bowel-moistening, laxative drugs have the side effect of causing habitual constipation; overusing them carries great long-term trouble. Only when the beneficial bacteria in his intestines became active again could he thoroughly get rid of constipation.

I am a medical man, but I do not wish to overuse drugs on myself, on my father, or on my patients. Often, medicine only makes a mess of things.

My experiences over these years tell me that many problems cannot be solved by medical means. As patients, if we wish to survive long-term in a diseased state, we need to tame our own hearts and learn the skills of coexisting with illness, rather than fighting medicine to the bitter end. The best health-care doctor is ourselves.