A Lung Cancer Patient Who Stopped Treatment and Recurred After Four Years of Disease-Free Survival

The patient was a man born in 1951, from Yichang, Hubei Province. Because a relative of his—an ovarian cancer patient I had treated long-term with reasonable results—had referred him, he came to me for help.

The patient first came to me on September 29, 2020. At that time a CT at Yichang First People's Hospital (Three Gorges University People's Hospital; outpatient no. 0000745024, study no. CT200910011) had revealed a mass in the upper lobe of the left lung, about 2.2 × 1.8 cm, enlarged mediastinal lymph nodes, plus old pulmonary tuberculosis and mild emphysema. The hospital diagnosed a malignant tumor. The patient was admitted but rejected Western treatment and hoped for TCM.

This was during the pandemic, and hospitalization was cumbersome. The patient wanted purely TCM treatment. I advised him to follow the treatment approach in my article "My Practical Experience Using Large Multi-Herb, Multi-Target Broad-Spectrum Anticancer Chinese Formulas", using a large compound of more than a hundred herbs (specific herbs listed in that article) to improve the success rate. I also asked the patient to return for a repeat examination every three months to observe the effect and determine the treatment direction.

The patient and his family accepted the plan. From September 30, 2020 to March 18, 2021, on repeat CT at Yichang People's Hospital (outpatient no. 0000745024, study no. CT210318040), the left upper-lobe lesion had grown to 2.8 × 1.9 cm. Although over these three and a half months the tumor had progressed only slightly, both I and the family were dissatisfied, so we decided to adjust the formula. We used herbs with specific effects on lung tumors—Galla chinensis (wubeizi), earthworm (dilong), Orthomorpha (shanqushu), toad venom (chansu), Curcuma zedoaria (sanleng), Curcuma aromatica (ezhu), raw Astragalus, Coix seed (yiyiren), Angelica, Polygonatum, Fagopyrum dibotrys (jinqiaomai), frankincense (ruxiang), myrrh (moyao), and musk (shexiang)—for disease-specific treatment.

The patient continued on the adjusted regimen until July 16, 2021. His clinical symptoms resolved, and a repeat check at a local physical-examination center found no trace of the lung lesion. I strongly suspected the family had brought back the wrong report, but after repeated verification, the results still showed the patient was tumor-free.

The family asked what to do next. I believed lung cancer would not be completely cured so quickly and asked the patient to continue treatment for a while to consolidate. Local doctors, however, suspected the earlier diagnosis might have been a misdiagnosis, because they did not believe Chinese medicine could completely eliminate a tumor, especially in such a short time. Probably influenced by this view, the patient also felt there was no need to continue, and stopped TCM treatment.

After stopping treatment, the patient remained well until June 11, 2025, when his family contacted me again. They said the patient had suddenly lost his voice and, at Zigui County People's Hospital in Yichang, Hubei (outpatient no. 5270159198, image no. 125061100054), a CT had shown a 5.9 × 3.3 cm mass in the apical segment of the left upper lobe, with multiple calcified nodules in both lungs. The family asked me again for treatment advice.

If this patient had not later relapsed, his case would probably forever have been regarded as a misdiagnosis rather than as Chinese medicine having temporarily eliminated his tumor; even I myself would have suspected the earlier reports were wrong. But after this recurrence, we all realized we had been blinded by a bias that TCM cannot eliminate tumors, leading to a wrong judgment. If, after the tumor had been eliminated that time, the patient had continued consolidation treatment, or had regularly taken Chinese medicine for prevention each year, perhaps this recurrence would not have occurred.

In fact, cases like this are not uncommon. After some cancer patients' tumors shrink or even disappear under TCM treatment, some Western physicians conclude it was not treatment effect but a prior misdiagnosis. We have never had a definitive case to refute such a biased claim. The case I present here is quite typical and sufficient to refute the view that Chinese medicine is ineffective against tumors.

If we label every patient who responds to TCM as a "misdiagnosis" and refuse to acknowledge TCM's effect, it has a very negative impact on the patients themselves. Such an approach disregards objective facts and will inevitably mislead patients, causing them to suffer on the road to recovery. The patient in this article is lamentable: had he not interrupted treatment and instead continued consolidation for a time, his disease-free survival would surely have been longer than just these four or five years.