My Medical Philosophy: The Spark of Research Has Been Lit

On August 24, 2026, I took the high-speed train from Beijing to the ancient capital Luoyang to meet the laboratory director of a local tertiary hospital and negotiate an animal-experiment collaboration on treating lung cancer using the large, multi-component, multi-target approach.

The night before, I had caught a cold. So as not to delay this scheduled trip, I used an unconventional treatment. Over about an hour I drank nine packets of Mahuang Tang (Ephedra Decoction) granules in succession. The dosing was aggressive, but it worked well; after three hours my cold symptoms had completely resolved. I would not, however, recommend that others do this, especially those with heart disease.

The ancients said one should not use ephedra in spring and summer. Why did I use Mahuang Tang in summer? The reason is simple—antiquity had no air conditioning, and therefore no air-conditioner disease. My cold was related to spending too long this summer in an air-conditioned library.

This hospital is the third tertiary hospital with which I reached a collaboration agreement this summer. Because tumor-bearing mice are already available there, this collaboration can quickly move into practical operation.

I left Beijing by rail at seven in the morning; after finishing the negotiations I was back in Beijing by 7:30 in the evening. The ancient capital Luoyang is beautiful, with many historical sites, but I had no time to linger and so left in haste without even taking a single landscape photograph. Now I have only this summer vacation as time that belongs entirely to me, and I can only arrange matters as efficiently as possible.

Earlier, the animal experiment on cholangiocarcinoma with a Shanghai tertiary hospital had already begun, and collaboration with a Guangdong tertiary hospital has also started. All my collaborators are PhDs, postdocs, or doctoral supervisors. In the past, such collaboration was something I could not even have imagined. After I missed my first-choice college in the 1998 national entrance exam and lost the chance to study clinical medicine, I never thought that one day I would be doing medical research at this level.

But because over the past eleven years I persisted in study and clinical research, kept writing every day, and produced more than 5.3 million characters, I attracted the attention of many friends I had not expected. Most of the medical PhDs I now work with have followed me for more than five years and read many of my articles, so when I actually met them in person, things went more smoothly than I had imagined.

On my return, my wife met me at Beijing West Railway Station to take me home. On the way I shared some of my thinking with her. I told her that unless the craving for fame and profit is extinguished, scholarly aspirations cannot be fulfilled. Now that I am moving toward collaborating with others to study this large topic, I must set aside the contest for fame and profit and adopt an open attitude so that others will want to work with us long term.

My wife asked whether I should apply for patents to protect my intellectual property. I told her about Academician Wang Zhenyi, whose story I had heard in a medical-ethics class, and described how Academician Wang chose on the question of patents. Precisely because Wang, a hematology expert, gave up the patent, countless patients could receive the best treatment at extremely low cost.

I have seen an interview video of the elderly Academician Wang, oxygen tube in his ward, saying that when a new therapy solves a problem that was previously unsolvable, his heart is already satisfied. Watching that video moved me deeply. At that moment I thought of my own mother; if the world had more doctors like Wang, patients like my mother would have suffered far less.

I told my wife that our child is gifted and has a fine character; we need not worry about his future and have no need to amass excessive wealth. Rather, we should uphold the physician's benevolent heart in advancing medical progress and do what benefits ordinary patients to the greatest possible extent. If medicine does not advance, then when our own family members encounter disease in future, we will still be helpless.

On all these questions my wife has supported my choices, and that is what I am most grateful to her for. Without her support over the years, I could not have persisted on the path of medical research for so long despite so many unfavorable factors, nor could I have returned to university at my present age to study clinical medicine.

I hope that, through collaborating with these PhDs from affiliated hospitals of Project 985 and Project 211 universities, I can spread my ideas and put down roots. To do this I must continue to put in more effort and pursue research and collaboration with an even more open spirit. A new medical idea will inevitably be accompanied by all sorts of controversy. That these high-level medical talents are interested in my medical philosophy and willing to research and explore it together with me—I am already grateful and satisfied.

If such research succeeds, the result will ultimately not be mine alone but a collective achievement. Later, I will not claim as my own the contributions of the other researchers involved; on the contrary, I prefer to give young people greater willingness and interest to continue along this path. Only by their participation can this medical idea hope to develop further.

Ten years ago I could not have dared imagine that one day I would stand shoulder to shoulder with medical colleagues trained at institutions such as the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Fudan University, Sun Yat-sen University, Southern Medical University, Jinan University, Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, and Zhengzhou University, jointly studying one large common topic.

But now I believe that, as the research deepens and as I launch my multilingual websites, ten years from now I may even be conducting medical exploration together with medical researchers from all over the world. My medical philosophy could spread more widely and exert influence on a broader scale.

This process of sorting out clinical ideas and refining and exchanging scholarly thought is itself a great improvement for me. Recently, a pancreatic-cancer patient treated with my large, multi-component, multi-target approach saw his tumor markers fall off a cliff after two weeks—from over a thousand to just over five hundred—and his subjective well-being also improved markedly. I could not have achieved such results in the past.

If these young friends had not encouraged me to organize my thoughts into writing, I would not have made such progress. So this is a process of mutual growth, and I owe them my thanks.

As far as medical research is concerned, at forty-seven I have only just begun to apply force; I can keep working for at least another twenty years. Over the next twenty years my focus will be on continuing to build the theoretical framework of the large, multi-component, multi-target therapy and extending its application to more disease types. At the same time, together with more medical colleagues, I will use animal experiments and clinical practice to verify and continually refine the concrete treatment strategies—guided by this medical idea—for various refractory diseases.

This single spark is where my hope lies.