The Most Precious Medicine in the World: The Body's Self-Healing Capacity
"The illnesses of old age are all invited during one's prime; the miseries of decline are all wrought during one's heyday."
— Cai Gen Tan (Conversations from a Vegetable Root)
Every year I deal with thousands upon thousands of cancer patients. Many come to me and ask: "Why did I used to be free of all illness, and now suddenly have such a serious, incurable disease?"
A major illness never arrives out of the blue. If you previously felt nothing abnormal in your body, it is only because you were careless and inattentive. If you carefully recall and reflect, there must be many subjective and objective factors that gradually pushed your body into a diseased state.
Especially for a disease like cancer, it is by no means contracted in a day or two. Many cancers, from the initial precancerous lesion stage to final detection and diagnosis as cancer, take decades.
I am forty years old this year. Forty is a watershed in the human body. Once a person reaches forty, they distinctly feel their body beginning to send all kinds of unhealthy signals; I have deep personal experience of this.
Professional medical books often contain statements like "this disease commonly occurs after the age of forty." The classic TCM text Huangdi Neijing (The Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon) also holds that after men pass "five eight" (forty) and women pass "seven times seven," they begin to decline from their peak.
Aging is an unavoidable natural phenomenon. But some people age faster than normal, and are even felled by a seemingly sudden incurable disease. At its root, more than 70 percent of the cause is attributable to their failure to treat their bodies well in their prime.
Major illnesses develop gradually from nagging, unresolving minor ailments or even small bad habits, accumulating over time. Just an improper sitting or walking posture, sustained for forty years, can become a severe, day-and-night tormenting degenerative bone and joint disease after forty.
Since the Industrial Revolution, this natural law of gradual decline after forty has been altered by fast-paced, high-pressure lives and a heavily polluted environment; the age at which many people's bodies begin to decline has advanced considerably.
TCM says the supreme physician treats disease before it arises. Our ancestors valued preventive medicine greatly, holding that when a disease has just begun to send signals but not yet produced severe symptoms, one should intervene—by adjusting a person's emotional state, daily routine, living habits, living environment, and diet—to prevent the disease from arising at all. This is the ideal medicine.
In English, the word "doctor" derives from the Latin word for "teacher." The basic duty of a doctor should be to teach people how not to get sick and to impart knowledge of preventive medicine.
The human body is one of nature's most exquisite and outstanding works. The body itself has very powerful self-healing capacity and ordinarily does not fall ill. Usually, the reason we get sick is that we have not treated our bodies well.
As long as a person takes corrective measures before the illness becomes severe, the body's self-healing capacity can fully restore us to health.
Even someone already suffering from a serious illness can, as long as they find the causes and earnestly avoid them, dispel disease and prolong life to the greatest degree, and even create miracles of recovery.
Dr. Andrew Weil, an American physician who graduated from Harvard Medical School, after a period of clinical practice, grew deeply frustrated because he felt modern medicine was powerless in the face of many diseases.
He then spent several decades studying the body's self-healing capacity and wrote the once-famous bestseller Spontaneous Healing.
In this book, Dr. Andrew Weil collected a large number of cases of patients who had been given up by conventionally trained physicians but who, through various means, inexplicably healed themselves. He tracked the whole course of treatment by healers regarded as old-fashioned and fringe. His research is thought-provoking.
Dr. Weil did not give a particularly clear answer about the way of self-healing, but reading his work gives us much inspiration.
One sentence from this Harvard Medical School–trained MD struck me especially: "If one day I fall ill, I do not wish to be treated in the way I was taught to treat others, unless there is no other choice."
Dr. Weil further explained his reasoning: during his four years at Harvard Medical School and his internship year, nothing he learned touched the essence of disease and healing; it only suppressed pathology or merely eliminated overt symptoms.
Dr. Weil noted that most medicines carry the prefix "anti" in English: antihypertensives, anxiolytics, antidepressants, antihistamines, antiarrhythmics, antitussives, antipyretics, and so on. These drugs in fact merely suppress the patient's various symptoms.
And some seemingly disreputable itinerant practitioners—for example, an American chiropractor named Fulford whom Dr. Weil encountered—actually got to the root cause of the patient's illness, so Dr. Fulford could always resolve years of torment in ways that seemed strange, even beneath the dignity of many self-styled orthodox physicians.
What Dr. Fulford was best at was simply spinal manipulation. After the adjustment, his most common words were: "Leave the rest to Mother Nature."
The orthodox medical establishment scorned folk healers like Dr. Fulford, yet he produced results more convincing to patients than those of orthodox medical institutions.
Through word of mouth among patients, he was busy into his eighties, with a stream of patients still filling his doorway. Even in his nineties, he was invited to lecture across the United States.
Dr. Fulford's therapeutic philosophy was somewhat like that of Freud, who founded psychoanalysis. Both held that a patient's illness usually originated in a physical or psychic trauma in early childhood, after which a kind of "stress" arose; long-term, tight "stress" leads to a series of pathological changes. The physician's duty is to find the root of the injury and then readjust the patient.
The difference is that Freud focused on the psychiatric realm, while Dr. Fulford focused on the body's skeleton and the neural tissue closely related to it.
Since last year I have read widely in the literature on natural healing medicine, including India's Ayurveda.
The reason I became interested in this field is simply that, in my own clinical work, I encountered the same predicament Dr. Weil once faced.
Faced with a growing number of people seeking help, my greatest feeling is one of powerlessness, along with deep disappointment in the therapeutic effects of both modern and traditional medicine. More patients mean I must witness more deaths; every death is further proof that both Chinese and Western medicine are helpless.
A few years ago I still held developed-world medicine in reverence. But in the last two years I have come into contact with patients who were receiving high-end modern medical treatment in developed countries while undergoing TCM rehabilitation with me. I have also been fortunate to exchange ideas with physicians from the world's top medical institutions.
Practice shattered my past superstition about the medical standards of developed countries. To be honest, purely in terms of relieving patients' suffering, the results I personally achieve are better than those of the world-class institutions I once revered, while the cost is incomparably lower. As Dr. Weil says, modern medicine's overreliance on science and technology comes at a staggering price.
But I am also deeply disappointed in my own results. I roam about the ocean of medicine partly because I am searching for a breakthrough that would comfort myself.
I treated a depression patient for two years. Apart from resolving the stubborn headache that had plagued her for years and moderately easing her depressive mood, I achieved almost nothing.
This patient herself had been searching for other solutions. For a time she stayed at a Zen meditation center in Beijing, hoping Buddhist knowledge and methods might help her, but the result was even worse.
Recently she has taken up horticultural therapy and gone to work at a natural-healing institution that treats illness through gardening. I can clearly feel that she has relaxed considerably.
Moreover, after entering this community, she came across cases of severe depression, as well as autism and cerebral palsy patients, who had recovered or nearly recovered by growing potted plants.
I have also seen and heard of cancer patients who unexpectedly created survival miracles—for example, the cancer-stricken couple from Guizhou I once mentioned in an article, who miraculously survived for decades by planting trees on barren hills.
In these patients' recoveries, the role played by doctors was negligible. What truly helped them out of desperate straits was the body's self-healing capacity.
So what triggered their self-healing capacity?
The cause may be very complex. But after years of observation, I believe the following factors help patients build and strengthen their innate healing ability.
First, an interesting, engaging life.
The philosopher Bertrand Russell once said that walking down the street, almost everyone we see has trouble showing a cheerful face. People are weighed down by worries, frowning over inexplicable social rules and personal life pursuits.
Ill people are even more so.
To be honest, I myself feel that entering medicine is, in a sense, one of life's great disasters. We are destined to encounter large numbers of "tear packages." People who are ill can hardly have sunny dispositions; the doctor becomes their best confidant. Patients always have a bellyful of grievances, and their families can hardly have bright moments either.
I have known many cancer patients with very long survival times, and many who died quickly. Once a patient has consulted me even once, I already know whether he or she will be a long-term survivor—I just don't say it out loud.
The reason is simple: I can sense the aura emanating from a patient's life. Among patients who have remained deeply melancholy after falling ill, I have not seen a single long-term survivor. And none of the long-term survivors I have seen were people with narrow, anxious minds.
But what kind of person is weighed by worries, and what kind can be broad-minded?
I do not think that guzzling large amounts of "chicken soup for the soul" every day makes one broad-minded. Those broad-minded patients have mostly found an interesting life and radiated vitality.
Besides the examples I gave above, I have known cancer long-term survivors who were so passionate about fishing that they forgot themselves; patients who, after cancer, became obsessed with gathering herbal medicines in the wild to the point of forgetting they were ill; and cancer patients who loved cycling above all else. They all lived a long time.
Of course there are also patients who gained a new lease on life through religious faith.
They immersed themselves in a new life, enjoying it immensely. Gradually this happiness replaced past sorrow as the main theme of their lives.
A sunny mood does not come from anyone else; it can only come from the patient's own change.
Next, very importantly, one should consciously make a list of the things that easily trigger one's symptoms.
Some people are easily triggered mentally, some by food, some by behavior.
Personally, I believe that the reason the body develops various diseases must be that certain specific factors have made the patient a person easily triggered in some respect.
For example, an unhappy marriage may turn a person hysterical. The best thing to do is to end the marriage.
The great Chinese scholar Zhang Zhongxing once said that among all the interpersonal relationships in the adult world, the relationship between man and woman is the most important. Marriage affects not only a person's career but also their physical and mental health.
When two people marry and live together, getting along is very difficult.
The anthropologist Fei Xiaotong once said that the marriages easiest to adjust are actually endogamous—choosing one's lifelong partner among siblings or cousins within the same family. Because men and women raised in highly similar family environments easily reach agreement on various values.
But close-kin marriage violates the laws of nature's evolution. Humans now marry partners from outside the family through various means, inevitably producing personality differences due to different upbringings and educational backgrounds; sometimes these differences are hard to bridge. In the end, some couples continually inflict hurt and negative emotions on each other.
Countless patients' physical and mental illnesses should be blamed on their terrible marriages and exhausting families.
The ancient TCM text Yifang Kaoyu contains the saying: "When emotional excess is extreme, no medicine can cure it." If a person falls ill because of factors like a marriage that easily triggers hysterical emotions, medicine cannot solve their problem. To stop boiling water by lifting the pot is less effective than removing the firewood; finding such pathogenic factors and resolving them is more useful than medicine.
Similarly, some people cannot tolerate many foods: eating a certain food triggers a whole series of symptoms. Such foods—and even foods scientists have found to cause disease—should be put on this list.
There are also behavioral habits with the same symptom-triggering effect. The most typical are smoking and drinking; people who take up these habits should give them up if they want to recover.
I myself have recently had lower back and leg pain. Besides treatment, I carefully observed every movement of mine to see which actions worsened the pain. For instance, walking a lot or walking fast made it worse; sitting on a soft sofa hurt more than sitting on a hard bench; crossing my legs hurt more than keeping them flat. Through these observations I gradually identified my various triggering behaviors, avoided them one by one, and recovered quickly.
People often ask me what patients can and cannot eat, or what they can and cannot do. Actually, it is wrong for the doctor to answer this question; the patients themselves should observe and find the answers.
Some patients get stomach pain from sweets, others from spicy food; each patient's reaction to food is completely different.
Some patients' legs hurt when they do not exercise or walk slowly (e.g., restless legs syndrome), while others' lower back and legs hurt when they walk a lot or fast (e.g., patients with lumbar disc herniation or pelvic misalignment).
Even for the same disease, different patients have different triggering factors; as long as patients observe carefully, they can always find them.
In the field of self-healing, the doctor can play only a small part; the patient is the greatest contributor.
I got to know an older brother in the cancer community. He is a patient with secondary lymphatic tumor of unknown cause, and his survival time has been quite long. Many fellow patients thought perhaps he was just lucky, having a less malignant cancer.
Actually not. His distinguishing strength is that he observes himself at every moment. He does not ask doctors what he should or should not do or eat; he has thoroughly studied all the adverse reactions that various external stimuli produce in his body and mind, and written his own list of prohibitions.
There is no doubt that the prohibition list he wrote for himself is far more useful than what a doctor would prescribe based on general statistical patterns. He is also the broad-minded patient obsessed with gathering wild herbs that I mentioned above, so his longevity surprises me not at all.
We met at a gathering in 2012. He was nearly sixty then, vigorous and strong. Among over a hundred people, he, I, and another gastric cancer patient performed best on the mountain climb; a crowd of cancer-free family members could not keep up with him.
He who saves himself is helped by heaven.
The power of Mother Nature of which Dr. Fulford spoke favors only such patients.
Only when one loves life does life radiate splendor for us. Only when we treat our bodies well does our body treat us well in return.
Since the second half of last year I have gradually tried to reduce medication. The composition of my self-composed anti-cancer formula went through a process from few to many, then from many back to few. Eventually some pill formulas I gradually pared down to only 3–6 herbs, yet they still have quite good anti-cancer effects.
Among patients I saw in the second half of last year, quite a few—especially lung cancer and brain tumor patients—achieved results beyond my own expectations in my trial of treating cancer with only a few herbs: tumors shrank rapidly, strength recovered markedly, and quality of life was high.
The reason is simple: I gradually broke free from my old fixed thinking. Rely only on a few highly targeted medicines to control the patient's main symptoms; leave the rest to Mother Nature.
So for this group of patients I gave more emotional encouragement and guidance than medication. The doctor must believe in the patient's self-healing capacity in order to mobilize the patient's self-healing system, making it the most important "medicine" beyond the prescription and helping the patient recover.
The patient, for their part, needs even more the eyes and ability to re-examine themselves, and to find their own way of self-healing.
I am now extending this therapeutic philosophy to patients with other diseases.
Finally, it is worth noting that many patients tell me they do know what their problem is, but they lack the courage and will to change: they cannot give up jobs that make them unhappy, cannot end relationships that cause them suffering, cannot find what they love.
All I can say is, then there is no one else to blame. When a decision should be made but is not, you will just keep suffering.