Insights and Updates

Many people mistake me for a Buddhist. In fact this is a colossal misunderstanding. I simply happened, out of boredom, to read a little about Buddhism and write a few Buddhist-flavored articles; I am far from a Buddhist believer. So I hope my Buddhist brothers…

Once, when I was away on a house call, a cancer patient in his twenties lay in a hospital bed and asked me, "Why did I get this disease?" He felt heaven was deeply unfair; his mother had died not long before of another cancer.

Recently I bought many Western-medicine monographs on oncology. As I read, I felt deeply ashamed, because reading these works showed me how very thin my own professional knowledge of oncology still is. I once saw a survey saying that among practicing oncologists in the United…

Loving monotony makes it easier for me to be happy Who ever really likes loneliness? One simply dislikes disappointment more. —Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood I no longer remember which anthropology monograph I read that told me the people of the Pacific island of Samoa like…

Since I taught myself medicine and began treating patients, I have met tens of thousands, yet few could truly be called kindred spirits. Brother Zhao, a man from Shaoxing, Zhejiang, is the only soulmate I have met in all these years—someone whose temperament and life…

In Shiniu Village, Dahe Town, Zisha County, Zunyi, Guizhou, there is a couple, Wei Fafu and Wang Ronglian, both stricken with cancer. The husband, Wei Fafu, had gastric cancer; the wife, Wang Ronglian, had oral cancer. By the doctors' judgment, neither would live long. But…

Among the couplets of the ancient Chinese, my favorite is Zuo Zongtang's: "Form the highest aspirations, form middling connections, enjoy the lowest blessings; stand on the highest ground, sit on the level ground, act from the broad place." In 2018 I turned forty. Confucius said,…

In the foreseeable future, human medicine will hardly reach perfection. From my own experience, the art of medicine has no end; the more it is pressed, the more refined it becomes. When a person studies medicine and applies it clinically to heal others, they always…

A patient once said to me that doctors need medical virtue, and patients also need "patient virtue." It is a fine saying. In our cancer circle, an old brother known as "Shengdi Mei Ya" once wrote an article titled, I believe, "Being a Good Patient."…

If I had to rank Chinese herbal medicines by their fatality rate among cancer patients, I would put sanqi (Panax notoginseng) first. The harm it causes is far more serious than that of the aristolochiaceous plants recently publicized online. This is probably because sanqi is…