Insights and Updates

In recent years, colleagues in Chinese medicine have often discussed with me how to improve clinical efficacy. Based on my own experience, my answer is: read medical cases (yi'an) extensively. From ancient times to the present, many physicians have left behind precious medical cases, which…

Before I knew it, I have been writing on my personal blog and official account for ten years. From August 2015 to now, it has been exactly ten years. Over these ten years I have written around 3,000 articles totaling perhaps ten million words; because…

Feng Zhirong, chief physician and former president of the Zigang (Sichuan) Chinese Medicine Hospital, once published a case of breast hyperplasia that is well worth studying. The patient, Teng, female, 23, unmarried, first presented on April 28, 1995. She reported breast distending pain, especially before…

The DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) is known as the "bible" of psychiatry and is a well-deserved authoritative textbook in the field. Counselors and physicians worldwide who study psychological and mental disorders treat it as their most important reference. The DSM is…

Gao Yimin was a native of Shenyang, Liaoning Province, born in 1920; he was a chief physician trained through the traditional apprenticeship (shicheng) system in Chinese medicine. From childhood he studied under the renowned Shenyang physician Zhang Zizhou. After liberation he served as honorary chairman…

I grew up in the countryside and had seen peppers in vegetable gardens since childhood. In recent years I have grown my own vegetables, including peppers, but this year is the first time in my life that I have grown a "pepper tree." This year…

The Buddha taught that life has eight sufferings; the three most closely bound up with old age are aging, illness, and death. When people are in their twenties or thirties, their impression of old age, sickness, and death is not deep, and so they can…

China Health Media Group's China Medical Science Press has published the "Famous Doctors Talk with You About Diseases" series; one of the volumes is titled Alzheimer's Disease. I gained a great deal from reading this book and would particularly like to recommend it to middle-aged…

Professor Zhao Yongchang was born in 1920. He was Manchu, from a family that had practiced medicine for generations. Starting in 1940, he apprenticed under Duan Futing, the great TCM external-medicine master; he was a great TCM physician of the apprenticeship lineage. At the end…

Before the pandemic, a recovering female lung-cancer patient in her forties in Zhejiang accidentally became pregnant while taking a formula containing Coix seed (yiyiren). Yesterday (July 8, 2025), a 38-year-old recovering female sarcoma patient in Jiangsu told me she had also accidentally become pregnant recently.