The Limitations of Medicine and Its Meaning

Before I came to understand medicine deeply, I liked criticizing physicians' professional skill, like most people. After studying medicine for a while, I gradually realized those earlier comments were naive and ignorant.

As of today, although human medicine appears advanced, in fact, compared with the complexity of human disease, the therapeutic effects of both TCM and Western medicine are far from satisfactory. Not only have diseases like cancer not been conquered, but countless acute and chronic diseases beyond cancer leave physicians worldwide helpless.

After my own mother died of cancer, the heavy blow of bereavement left me for a time very pessimistic and despairing about medicine, and I deeply doubted the meaning of my own medical studies. But after my emotions settled, I realized that the existence of medicine still has very important meaning.

Medicine is a discipline born of humanity's struggle against nature. People who eat the five grains generate a hundred illnesses is our inborn tragedy. Bodily suffering constantly torments us; when humanity can bear it no longer, we rise up and actively seek ways to cope, and through the accumulated experience of countless people, today's grand medicine has been achieved. Although medicine cannot be all we wish, objectively it has relieved much human suffering. That is medicine's greatest value for existing.

After falling ill, the final result of seeking medical care may likewise be disappointing. Many patients enter the hospital full of hope and leave without it, full of disappointment. In my own years of seeking care, I too have been struck by repeated disappointments. I am a patient with chronic hepatitis B (small three-positive), chronic bronchial asthma, chronic otitis media, and chronic prostatitis. Since my teens I have been tormented by various ailments and constantly sought care, yet to this day I have not obtained satisfactory results. In recent years I have more often treated myself to relieve various symptoms.

My own mother was tormented for decades by gastric ulcer and chronic gastritis. For as long as I can remember, I often saw her vomiting acid water in agony; she sought help everywhere but was never cured. She finally died in 2012 of cerebral hemorrhage and gastric cancer, at under fifty-eight. Modern medicine explains that her gastric cancer was closely related to her decades of chronic gastritis and gastric ulcer; even her cerebral hemorrhage was not unrelated.

Firsthand experience has given me a profound awareness of medicine's limitations. In seeking care, the highest-level doctors we found were academicians—five or more in all—and we also consulted German, American, and Japanese physicians. In desperation we sought out countless quacks and tried every folk remedy; none helped.

Lu Xun once said that TCM is a fraud, intentional or unintentional. In fact, Western medicine is no different. Most patients with intractable disease end their medical quests in failure. I suspect the vast majority ultimately, like me, have been tempered by chronic illness into people who regard suffering as negligible.

I often read the upright articles of standard-bearers who denounce TCM and qigong as pseudoscience. I envy these people their robust health and relative freedom from suffering, which has spared them firsthand experience of the efficacy of Chinese and Western medicine. I myself have not been so lucky; I needed to resort to multiple medical and extra-medical means just to maintain a basic, low-suffering existence. In this groping, I gradually developed, from practical experience, an affection for the very objects of criticism, because they genuinely relieved my suffering.

I will not blindly worship either TCM or Western medicine as any diehard fan would, because practice has likewise told me that neither has fundamentally resolved the suffering of patients, myself included; bodily suffering is stirred at any time. Every severe flare-up makes life seem not worth living.

Long illness makes a good physician. To be factual, many patients understand their own bodies better, and the treatment and prevention of certain diseases better, than doctors do—myself included. More than once, in my suffering, I have turned to other doctors, hoping a newly found specialist would relieve my pain, only to end up resignedly accepting the shattering of hope.

In the face of nature, humanity is fragile. In the face of disease, the moments when physicians can truly make a difference are less than one in three. Even treatment protocols endorsed by modern evidence-based medicine have only modest efficacy rates. Chen Zhu, former health minister and newly elected foreign member of the UK Royal Society, once said that medicine has great uncertainty, so treatment is a risky thing for the patient. This is the tragedy of medicine: at the moment it is needed to save a life, its uncertainty fills the heart with fear and helplessness.

For the great majority of chronic disease patients, staking one's health and life entirely on doctors is like climbing a tree to catch a fish. If one wants higher quality and longer life in the struggle against disease, one must, in addition to seeking medical care, actively carry out self-rescue—even though the various self-rescue means humanity has invented have often proved, against many diseases, to be a mantis waving its forelegs at a chariot. But rather than sit and await death, why not rise and fight? After all, treatment and self-rescue can win a chance to extend life.

Birth entails death; birth, aging, illness, and death are inescapable natural laws. As an engineering student, I was long captivated by so-called materialism and scientism and became their adherent. But this conviction, with age and experience, began to change. Life is rich; science is spare. In the face of the complex real world, the limitations of our knowledge are quite embarrassing. Proud people are made proud by their ignorance. As Socrates said, what he knew more than others was his own ignorance.

Patients should recognize both the value and the limitations of medicine. Falling ill is a misfortune; to emerge from it as much as possible, patients must put forth more effort than merely finding a doctor. Learning about health, adjusting one's body and mindset, and observing one's own physiological rhythms are of vital importance.