Minor Ailments, Major Cancer: Precancerous Lesions That Must Be Guarded Against

Whether humanity's current understanding of cancer as a pathology is right or wrong is still hard to judge. Cancer requires countless people to sacrifice their whole lifetimes and energies to research, and the great majority may grow old poring over classics, expending a lifetime of effort, and still gain nothing. Only by accumulating everyone's wisdom may cancer finally, perhaps, be overcome.

As for the "divine doctors" who repeatedly appear in the jianghu, I personally believe we cannot rely on them to finally solve the cancer problem. Leaving aside that the great majority of them are mere charlatans, even if they really could, as they advertise, treat some cancer patients (most of the folk "divine doctors" heavily fabricate the case records they claim to have "cured"—this is my conclusion after spending over a year tracking down the patients they claimed to have cured), a cancer treatment that cannot be widely available to the vast multitude, however miraculous the divine medicine, is of little benefit. In the end, the problem can only be solved by dedicated medical scientists and natural scientists.

When I see patients, my history-taking is extremely detailed, tracing all the way back to the patient's childhood environment, lifelong chronic disease history, history of psychological trauma, personality traits, and symptoms they once had but never valued. I hope to find the true cause of the patient's cancer. This follows the TCM principle that "in treating disease one must seek the root," exploring the origin of the illness.

Sometimes this history-taking meets with resistance from patients, because in their view it invades their privacy. But I believe that the very foundation of medicine cannot be separated from social medicine: people live in society, and their joys and sorrows, partings and reunions, and the trajectory of their past lives may all become carcinogenic factors. Cancer is truly a case of "three feet of ice not formed in one day"; to melt such a great block of ice, exploring its root is very important. If one does not trace the patient's pathogenic factors to the bottom and resolve the cause, cancer cannot be cured at its root.

When my mother was alive, she had a history of chronic gastritis and gastric ulcer lasting over forty years. I still remember how, around supper time in my childhood, she would always regurgitate acid water, looking in great distress. Because the family was poor, treatment was intermittent and never cured. Later her condition worsened; after Western drugs failed, she went to a TCM doctor. An old TCM doctor prescribed a stomach-nourishing formula, mainly right-astragalus and polygonatum (huangjing) and other right-qi-supporting herbs. At first she improved greatly, but after half a year of treatment she began vomiting and coughing blood and passing blood in her stool; finally it was discovered that she had gastric cancer.

Because of our mother-son relationship, I knew my mother's medical history thoroughly. Her history of gradual transition from gastric ulcer to chronic atrophic gastritis was very long, and both gastric ulcer and chronic atrophic gastritis are regarded by modern medicine as precancerous lesions. This seemingly casual minor ailment ultimately brewed a great catastrophe. As for why my mother developed gastritis: it was tied to her impoverished childhood, often hungry and cold; moreover, her father liked to lecture his children at the dinner table, leaving them with tense digestion while eating. All four of my mother's sisters were gastritis patients, without exception.

After I myself studied medicine, I began to analyze my mother's etiology point by point, sorting out her life experiences and medical history. I found that her cancer, though seeming accidental, was in fact inevitable. Yet after surgery, we only followed Western medicine's protocol treatment without addressing her precancerous root cause, so more than three years after surgery she recurred and metastasized widely; in the end, despite every effort, we could not save her. This is the most painful memory I revisit after reading so many medical books.

A tongue-cancer patient I saw also had a very clear chronic disease history before developing cancer: a lifetime of recurrent oral ulcers, uninterrupted, finally leading to tongue cancer in her forties. This seemingly casual minor ailment ultimately ended in an incurable disease—cancer. After surgery, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy, many patients give little further thought to their previous medical history and life experiences; the root of the disease is not removed, and the recurrence rate is extremely high.

A patient I treated was diagnosed with lung cancer with bone metastasis, but after my very detailed history-taking, I found that this bone-metastasis site had been injured thirty-seven years earlier and had ached ever since, worsening on damp, rainy days. Because of family financial hardship, the patient had not paid attention; later a large tumor grew right there. Western medicine called it lung cancer with bone metastasis; I personally feel this diagnosis may have things backwards. Perhaps the patient's lung cancer was caused by bone cancer arising from this fracture.

In another three cases, patients had a history of hypertension before cancer surgery—some with hypertension for over ten years before the cancer—and after surgery their blood pressure returned to normal. Whether hypertension caused the cancer, or hypertension was a complication of cancer, or both hypertension and cancer arose from a single common source in the patient, none of this is known.

For a time I explored root-seeking treatment for cancer patients after surgery, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy: while treating the tumor, also clearing away the chronic disease the patient originally had, changing bad lifestyle habits, adjusting the psychological state, and even improving family relationships. But in practice I found this very difficult.

This treatment idea was valued in ancient times. Wang Qishi, the famous Ming-dynasty physician and author of Li Xu Yuan Jian, emphasized this point greatly in his work. But such treatment is too idealistic, nearly impossible to realize. Because once a person's character, lifestyle, and family relationships are formed and solidified, they are extremely hard to change. Changing one person is already hard; changing the patient's entire family is almost impossible. Some problems are obvious to an outside observer, yet hard for the patient and family to recognize. Patients mostly hope to change all this through pure pharmaceutical treatment, which is nearly impossible. As long as the root of the disease remains, though the tumor may briefly disappear, it will grow back, because the tumor's seeds remain and the soil for its survival and development remains; with these two conditions present, not recurring is the difficult outcome.