Reason Is the Most Reliable Lifeline

In this life, birth, aging, illness, and death are unavoidable for everyone. Those who go a lifetime without ever being troubled by disease are truly the most enviable people on earth. But such people are extremely few. Since we humans eat the five grains and are exposed to wind and rain, we are bound to suffer from a hundred ailments. Once ill, we must find ways to deal with the disease. When people are in a desperate hurry to be cured, they are very prone to seeking help blindly from any quarter.

There is a great deal of shady business in the field of healthcare. In this world, besides clinical doctors and generations of unlicensed folk healers, there are all sorts of quack doctors, religious believers, sellers of health supplements, and witches and sorcerers, all claiming they can cure disease. Yet patients and their families, at such moments, are extremely prone to panic and confusion and do not know what to do. When a person's life and health are threatened, they will readily pay any price to find someone to treat them.

After falling ill, the process of searching for a solution to one's disease is a process of grasping at a lifeline. In truth, the best lifeline is each person's own reason. Over the years I have encountered many deeply regrettable patients and families. I call them regrettable because their illnesses should never have reached that stage, yet they were swindled out of all their savings by quacks and con artists while also losing their health.

There was once a breast cancer patient who joined a QQ group I was in. Upon joining, she made a startling announcement: her breast cancer had been cured by a TCM physician she had found. As expected, this caused a sensation, so I questioned the patient carefully about how long her disease had been diagnosed. She said only about a year. When I looked into it more closely, I learned that her breast had already ulcerated and developed a small opening. I asked her how she knew her breast cancer was cured. The patient said her TCM doctor had told her the disease was gone.

Several months later, her condition progressed rapidly. A few months after that, she asked me whether there was a better way to help her take her own life, because the ulcer on her breast had grown larger and larger and had seriously destroyed her ability to go on living.

There are also patients who, out of deep conviction that chanting scriptures can cure their diseases, devote themselves entirely to chanting. In the end, of course, the disease is not cured but worsens rapidly. Some, after being brainwashed, take up health supplements; not only do they themselves believe supplements can cure their cancer, they also earnestly try to persuade fellow cancer patients to take supplements to fight cancer.

Our hospitals in China, whether public or private, are indeed too expensive. Moreover, because there are so many patients and so few doctors, the quality of care is also poor. On the one hand, many patients do not achieve ideal results in hospital; on the other hand, many diseases are themselves very hard to cure. Driven by the will to survive, patients easily lose their reason and believe all sorts of mystical talk and absurd theories, abandoning rationality.