Insights and Updates

Do cancer patients receiving Chinese medicine need regular Western-medicine re-examinations? In most cases, the answer is yes. Because we need objective imaging and hematological examinations to determine the therapeutic effect, in order to assess whether the current treatment plan is working. But for those end-stage…

Not long ago I read an article in *Scientific American* about how the parent-child relationship promotes the brain development of both father and child at the same time. The article mentioned that when a father cares for a newborn, not only does the child's brain…

Pursue simplicity, and keep reason. — Alfred North Whitehead, British mathematician and philosopher The biologist Hermann Muller said: "If you regard 'academic life' as a way of escaping reality, then do not study biology. Through this discipline, human beings can approach the mystery of life."…

This is the second time I am recommending a book by Siddhartha Mukherjee; the last time I recommended *The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer*, and this time I recommend another of his books, *The Gene: An Intimate History*. Siddhartha Mukherjee is an…

What makes a good article? This is a question on which different people have different views. The renowned Chinese scholar and translator Zi Zhongyun once put forward a view: she holds that "making the profound accessible" (shen ru qian chu) is the highest and hardest…

1 I was born in a village surrounded by mountains in eastern Hubei. Our village was large—said to be the third-largest in our county, and the largest village in the whole county settled by a single clan; the other large villages were made up of…

The patient, Mr. Meng, a 40-year-old male with liver cancer, first visited the clinic on June 8, 1992. That January, the patient had undergone a partial resection of the right lobe of the liver through a combined thoracoabdominal incision at a certain hospital; postoperative pathology…

Why weep over a part of life? Do you not see that all of life brings tears? — The philosopher Seneca The title of this article borrows from the Chinese translation of a book by Alain de Botton, translated by Zi Zhongyun; the Chinese title…

The most painful thing for a person is to have his will controlled by another. —The philosopher Schopenhauer As my child has grown, I as a father have often asked myself: what kind of family education should I give him so that he will be…

There is a class of people in this world who live inside their own world. I am one of them, and because of powerful inherited genes, my son is one of them too.Over the last year or two, my son has gradually found a direction…