Reprinted: "Recollections of Treatment at Sun Bingyan's Clinic" by the Noted Sina Cancer-Blogger Shengdi Mei Ya
This happened nearly twenty years ago. Illness had made my memory very poor, and the impression of this episode has long been blurred; I can only recall the general outline.
In the spring of 1995, more than half a year after I was diagnosed with MM (multiple myeloma), I read in a book about the cancer-treatment experience of the folk TCM physician Sun Bingyan. He held that the formation of cancer was not merely due to congestion and stagnation of qi and blood, or accumulation of phlegm and food, but more fundamentally to the accumulation and stagnation of "toxin" in the zang-fu organs. This toxin was different from other toxins recognized in TCM, such as fire-toxin, heat-toxin, or warm-toxin; he therefore called it "cancer-toxin." Cancer-toxin is highly malignant and severely harms the body; it cannot be addressed by ordinary medicines that resolve phlegm and dissipate nodules or activate blood and resolve stasis. Rather, one must employ harsh formulas to fight poison with poison, purge and expel stasis, while attending to the whole body, in order to achieve results. Fighting poison with poison is one of the ancient TCM traditions for treating tumors, but the toxic herbs Sun Bingyan used were very different from those of other TCM physicians of his time, and even of earlier ones. Other physicians merely used common toxic substances such as toads, geckos, and nux vomica seeds — a small number of kinds, with low toxicity and small doses. Sun Bingyan's "fighting poison with poison" centered on violently toxic substances such as mercury preparations, arsenic preparations, blister beetles (Banmao), and croton beans (Badou) — many varieties, high toxicity, and large doses. Moreover, unlike some TCM physicians who used only one or two drugs such as arsenic, Sun Bingyan's approach consistently wove together disease differentiation and pattern differentiation (bianbing and bianzheng), taking into account cold and heat, phlegm-dampness, and qi stagnation and blood stasis, and using many herbs. He prepared the violently toxic drugs and other relatively toxic medicines into several patent medicines, such as Huadu Tablets (main ingredients: calomel Qingfen, realgar Xionghuang, Glauber's salt Yuanmingfen, Cremastra appendiculata Maocigu, and honeycomb Fengfang), Xin Dan (main ingredients: centipede Wugong, pangolin scales ShanJia, Cremastra shancigu, Glabra/Loqut root Tufuling, and deer antler Lujiao), Xiaol pills (main ingredients: verdigris Tonglu, centipede, Dioscorea bulbifera Huangyaozi, croton seed Badouren, and realgar), and walnut-branch extract. At the same time, according to each patient's specific condition, he would prescribe a decoction combining disease differentiation and pattern differentiation. In the decoctions, Sun Bingyan also frequently used rhubarb (Dahuang) and Glauber's salt (Yuanmingfen) as purgatives — on the one hand to expel pathogen, and on the other to prevent poisoning by promoting urination and bowel movement.
Sun Bingyan's cancer-treatment philosophy convinced me completely, and I immediately decided to seek treatment from him. But the Internet barely existed then, and I could not find where he practiced. It was not until the summer of the following year (1996), with the help of a classmate, that I learned Sun Bingyan was seeing patients at the Beijing Geriatric Hospital outpatient clinic. I went to him at once. By then, besides the original lung and inguinal, axillary, and supraclavicular lymph-node metastases, I also had multiple metastases to the liver, gallbladder, and bone. However, because I had not received Western treatment and had only taken Chinese medicine, my overall condition was fairly good: I could eat, sleep, and walk. As for symptoms, the lungs caused almost no discomfort; the bone metastases only occasionally caused mild pain in the scapula and upper spine, but the persistent abdominal distension from liver and gallbladder metastases was already very distressing. Without Sun Bingyan, I surely would not have lasted even half a year, because MM itself metastasizes very rapidly, and the speed of my MM progression was rare: two days after an abnormal sensation appeared in the right inguinal region and I felt enlarged lymph nodes, the same sensation appeared in the left groin, and on palpation I also found enlarged lymph nodes. Two more days later, an abnormal sensation appeared in the right axilla, and palpation again found enlarged lymph nodes. After that came the left axilla, then the right supraclavicular and left supraclavicular nodes in turn. The lymph-node enlargement spread from the right groin to the left supraclavicular area in only about a week! Another week or so later, intermittent chest tightness and dry cough appeared; a chest X-ray showed an opacity in the right lung. A follow-up a month and a half later showed the opacity had clearly enlarged. I have never seen a second case progress at such a speed.
Fortunately, I met Sun Bingyan, and my condition came to an abrupt halt without progressing further.
The Beijing Geriatric Hospital should not be the present Beijing Geriatric Care Hospital; I have just looked at the latter's official website, and it has never used the name Geriatric Hospital. I have also forgotten the exact location of the Geriatric Hospital. I only remember the hospital was not large and rather quiet. The place where Sun Bingyan saw patients was not in the hospital's outpatient building; his registration and fees were independent, so he probably was not a formal physician of the hospital but held a contracting arrangement — the hospital provided the premises and he paid the hospital a certain fee.
Because my lungs had not been re-examined for a long time, I decided to take a chest X-ray at the Geriatric Hospital before seeing him, so I registered with the internal medicine department. The doctor was a middle-aged woman. When I told her I had come for an examination because of cancer, she said solemnly, "No matter what serious illness one has, there is a fundamental solution..." I immediately became all attention, only to hear her continue: "That is the Falun Great Law." I was somewhat disappointed, but it was still the nationwide qigong craze, so her words were not entirely out of place. I told her I was already practicing another qigong, one said to treat cancer, and she stopped lobbying me. At that time I was indeed practicing a qigong advertised to cure cancer; it was only years later that I realized trying to cure cancer with qigong is basically a waste of time.
The place where Sun Bingyan saw patients was a low building — I no longer remember whether it had two or three floors — and the entrance seemed to be at the back.
I had expected many patients and hard-to-get appointments, but in fact there were not many patients; one could even say they were few.
By now I cannot clearly remember Sun Bingyan's appearance; I only recall he had a square face, graying hair, and sometimes smoked during consultations. Beside him sat a young woman acting as assistant — probably his daughter Sun Liying, said to have a Western-medicine background.
While the two patients ahead of me were being seen, I stood aside and watched. The first was a man in his fifties or sixties, probably with lung cancer. Sun Bingyan pointed at the films and told him, "The tumor has shrunk." Everyone around was greatly encouraged. The other was a brain-tumor patient around thirty, who seemed blind. He asked, "When I came last time I could still see; now I cannot. Does that mean the treatment is ineffective?" I immediately thought to myself: need you even ask? Unexpectedly, Sun Bingyan answered, "It is still effective," and repeated the words. I could not help questioning inwardly: how can that be considered effective? Later I saw that blind fellow patient again, groping to put the patent medicines and raw herbs he had just received into a woven bag. He had apparently come alone — how hard that must be for a blind man! A wave of pity rose in me. I wondered whether this medication would work for him.
When my turn came, I briefly described my condition to Sun Bingyan and handed him the chest X-ray I had just taken. He hung it on the light box, pointed to a spot, and said to me, "There are metastatic lesions in the left lung too." Because my lungs were essentially asymptomatic, I felt nothing special on hearing this.
Just as he was about to write the prescription, I suddenly thought of something: the previous few patients had all gone to a nearby instrument for some test — it seemed to check microcirculation through the fingers — but I had not been scheduled for it. So I reminded him, "Shouldn't I have that check too?" Sun replied, "You don't have to, but if you want to, it's fine." I said I would do it. They performed the test on me as well, and it cost about one or two hundred yuan. It was only years later that I realized that instrument was mainly for revenue generation and meant little for treatment; Sun Bingyan had assumed I was a poor student and so had not scheduled it, but I had voluntarily wasted the money!
Because it was the first visit and I was afraid the medicine might not be right, I decided to stay in Beijing for a week to try it. I asked Sun Bingyan whether he could prescribe just one week's supply first, with more to be prepared when I was ready to go home. He agreed, and told me that from Monday to Friday they had a staff member at the hospital who decocted herbs for patients. I had thought I would have to arrange decocting myself; learning they could do it for me, I felt much relieved.
Sun Bingyan prescribed Huadu Tablets, Xin Dan, walnut-branch extract, and two or three other patent medicines, plus a decoction. I did not keep the decoction formula, but its contents were similar to those in Sun Bingyan's book. To my surprise, the decoction did not contain the three yang-warming herbs he commonly used — dried ginger (Ganjiang), aconite (Fuzi), and cinnamon (Rougui) — nor did it contain blister beetle (Banmao). I did not care whether the yang-warming herbs were included: although I had only five or six nail half-moons (the pink-white crescent at the base of the fingernails), which by Sun Bingyan's book meant a cold constitution, the first TCM physician I saw had mostly used heat-clearing and detoxifying herbs on me, and they had worked very well. Without him, I would have died before even seeing Sun Bingyan's book, let alone seeking treatment from him. So I did not set much store by yang-warming herbs, but whether Banmao was included mattered a great deal. Having read Sun Bingyan's book, I felt that only a great poison like Banmao could damage cancer cells. Now that he was not prescribing it, I naturally felt uneasy and asked him to add it. He said nothing, added one or two Banmao to the decoction formula, and added a few companion herbs such as talc (Huashi).
After writing the prescription he added, "You can also take one dose over two days." I asked why, and he said, "Aren't you a student? This way you save money." It turned out he thought I was still an undergraduate (actually I was already approaching thirty). "But you can't split one day's medicine over two days! How can you be so casual!" I retorted inwardly.
When I paid, I found the medicine was not very expensive — it came to around 1,500 yuan a month. Of course, that was not cheap at the time either.
After getting the medicine, I went straight to the decoction room to have that day's decoction brewed.
The decoction room was in another part of the hospital, perhaps a single-story building. While still some distance away, I could already smell the Chinese-medicine odor drifting out. Unlike any Chinese-medicine smell I had known before, this one was foul and turbid. The closer I got, the stronger the foul smell; by the time I stepped into the decoction room, the odor was almost enough to make one retch.
The decoction room was very rudimentary, with only a few gas burners. A woman of about fifty was tending the herb pots on them; I later learned she had been retired and hired by Sun Bingyan specifically to decoct herbs. To identify the source of the foul smell, I leaned my nose close to each pot and sniffed, only to find that every pot emitted the same foul odor. Ten-plus days later, when I brewed herbs at home, I investigated and finally found that the foul smell was mainly caused by cinnamon being decocted together with insect drugs; if the cinnamon was omitted, the smell was not so foul.
Besides the revolting smell, another unusual feature soon caught my attention: a pot just taken off the fire is very hot, and most people would wrap it in a towel to carry it. But Sun Bingyan's decocting aunt carried the pots directly with her bare hands, without wrapping anything. At my astonishment, the aunt calmly explained that her hands were naturally insensitive to heat.
Decocting took two or three hours — an awkward stretch of time. I simply stayed in the decoction room chatting with the aunt while taking my first dose of the patent medicine. Somewhat unexpectedly, the patent medicines also smelled bad: Xin Dan was tolerable, but Huadu Tablets smelled nasty as soon as the bottle was opened, and the walnut-branch extract was no better. That was only the first dose. After ten days or half a month, Huadu Tablets and the walnut-branch extract had become dreadful to me — I felt nauseated before they even entered my mouth. Yet whether decoction or patent medicine, they only smelled disgusting; after taking them I felt no discomfort, let alone nausea, vomiting, or loss of appetite.
When the medicine was brewed, I drank a small bowl there in the decoction room and took the rest back to the hotel.
To save money, when I booked accommodation I did not ask for a single room but looked for a double or triple. Unfortunately the hotel I found had no doubles or triples left, only an eight-person dorm. Since I was out all day anyway and only returned to sleep, I could not be bothered to change places, so I took the eight-person room, thinking I would switch tomorrow if I could not sleep in it.
That small bit of laziness had quite a consequence.
That night, the others in the room ran the ceiling fan all night. Though I felt a bit cold, I could not ask seven people to accommodate me, so I endured it. The next morning I found I had caught a cold: low fever, clear nasal discharge, and a swollen face. I was still medically illiterate and did not know this was a cold complicated by acute nephritis in Western terms, or "wind-water" in TCM. But one thing I did know: the decoction prescribed the day before was no longer suitable. So I ran to Sun Bingyan and told him about the cold. He added Fangfeng (Saposhnikovia) and Jingjie (Schizonepeta), 10 g each, to the decoction, and prescribed a Western drug. After receiving it, I found the bag labeled "Prednisone." Though medically illiterate, I knew prednisone was a hormone with considerable side effects, and thought: I merely have a cold; why are you giving me hormones? So I did not take it and threw it away the next day. It was only years later that I realized prednisone can treat nephritis; at the time Sun Bingyan had prescribed it for my kidney condition.
With the adjusted decoction, plus taking Tongrentang Ganmao Qingre Granules on my own, my cold resolved in two or three days, and most of the swelling subsided.
During those days I still went to the decoction room every day to wait for my medicine and chat with the decocting aunt. Once we were on familiar terms, seeing how much I admired Sun Bingyan, she poured a little cold water on me. She said there had once been a cancer patient treated in-patient here who, after a period, not only failed to improve but developed several large lumps on his back. When the family asked Sun Bingyan what to do, he actually told them to continue staying. From the aunt's tone it was clear the patient did not improve. Had it been anyone else, having just seen that blind brain-tumor patient with their own eyes and now hearing this insider's example, they would probably have lost confidence in Sun Bingyan on the spot. But I did not. I felt Sun Bingyan was no god; naturally he had both successes and failures, and what mattered was that he had real skill. Moreover, I felt those failures could not be entirely blamed on him — some patients had had excessive chemotherapy, some had been too seriously ill, and then success is hard to achieve. That blind brain-tumor patient and the patient who developed back lumps during in-patient care likely fell into that category. As for Sun Bingyan denying that the previous medicine had failed for the brain-tumor patient, and telling the patient who developed back lumps to continue treatment with him, at the time I thought he may have been under pressure to make money, but after studying TCM in recent years I feel he may simply have wanted to make one more effort. In any case, my confidence in Sun Bingyan did not change. This is not to say I thought he could cure me — I was not that naive; given my condition at the time, I felt the best achievable result with him would be a few years of remission. On his side, he surely did not expect to cure me either, otherwise he would not have suggested I split one day's medicine over two days to save money.
After the cold resolved, my condition showed no further abnormality, so I asked Sun Bingyan to prescribe more than a month's supply for me to take home. This time he added dried ginger, aconite, and cinnamon, 10 g each, to the decoction. The whole formula had over twenty herbs; among them only these three were yang-warming, while cooling herbs such as oldenlandia (Baihuasheshecao) and Imperata root (Baimaogen) were more numerous. Many people think Sun Bingyan's cancer treatment relied mainly on yang-warming, or balanced yang-warming with fighting poison with poison; some even classify him with the Fire Spirit school. I think this view is one-sided. In my view, fighting poison with poison was the core of Sun Bingyan's cancer treatment; by comparison, yang-warming played a much smaller part.
After taking the medicine at home for a while, the abdominal distension that had distressed me greatly eased and only occasionally recurred, but every morning when I looked in the mirror I noticed facial swelling worsening. As a medical illiterate I could not judge efficacy, nor did I understand that the swelling was caused by toxic drugs damaging my kidneys; I mistook it for a sign of superior vena cava syndrome. Since superior vena cava syndrome had appeared, the disease was naturally progressing. Under these circumstances I should have stopped the medicine at once, but I felt I was waiting to die anyway, so why bother flitting about; I mechanically continued taking Sun Bingyan's medicine until it was finished. By then I was swollen beyond recognition, yet I felt no discomfort, and my appetite and strength had not declined.
For a period in earlier years, I had always thought the swelling back then was entirely caused by Sun Bingyan's overly toxic medicine; later I realized it also had to do with my kidneys not being in great shape to begin with. About two years before the cancer diagnosis, I once had an allergic reaction to pineapple; at the time my kidney regions felt sore and bloated, my whole body felt unwell, and there seemed to be a slight low fever — in retrospect that was a sign of kidney problems. Before going to Sun Bingyan, I had learned qigong from a qigong master F in another city of the province. Besides teaching qigong, F had studied TCM on his own and often carried a copy of Sun Bingyan's "Secret Cancer-Treatment Recipes"; he sometimes used formulas from the book to treat a few rural patients, but he only used decoctions, not patent medicines. Influenced by him, I had also copied a decoction formula from Sun Bingyan's book and had it filled at the pharmacy for myself, containing 3 centipedes, 6 g of scorpion (Quanxie), and 10 g each of dried ginger, aconite, and cinnamon. After only ten-plus days, I felt my face was not as thin as before and thought the formula was working and I had gained weight. Then one day F pointed at my face and said, "You've swelled up like this!" Only then did I realize it was edema. Such a tiny amount of toxic medicine causing edema shows how frail my kidneys already were. After taking Sun Bingyan's medicine for one day in Beijing, the great toxins damaged my kidneys, and catching cold at night brought on a cold with acute nephritis. Later, as the medication continued, the drug's damage to the kidneys grew steadily worse, until I was swollen beyond recognition. Had my kidneys been normal, taking Sun Bingyan's medicine might not have caused edema, or at least not such severe edema.
Continuing from the above: since I thought Sun Bingyan's medicine was ineffective, I did not return to him for follow-up. Only later, through examination, did I learn that the less than two months of medicine he had prescribed had already created an unprecedented miracle in the history of MM treatment — all the tumors in my body had vanished. They did not return until more than ten years later.
In recent years, while studying TCM, I have several times pondered why Sun Bingyan's medicine could cure me. I finally concluded: my cancer cells were exceptionally malignant and far more active than normal cells, so after so many poisons were taken, the cancer cells were hit first and hardest. Because multiple varieties of strongly toxic drugs were taken in large doses continuously for nearly two months, the cancer cells were wiped out completely, and the tumors disappeared.
Zhiyuan's note: Dr. Sun Bingyan's cancer-treatment results have been widely circulated in TCM anti-cancer circles. Shengdi Mei Ya was a patient personally treated by the veteran Dr. Sun Bingyan. This long essay records his own firsthand experience of being treated for cancer by Dr. Sun Bingyan — more truthful than any rumor.