The Remarkable Cancer Patients Who Beat the Odds by Taking a Passive Approach

First, I want to stress that I am not writing this article to advocate leaving cancer untreated and relying on spontaneous remission. For the overwhelming majority of cancer patients, going without treatment means they may die at once. Yet I have to say that, in real practice, I have encountered a handful of patients who took a passive, non-interventionist approach to their cancer and still created survival miracles. Perhaps their tumors were simply indolent to begin with.

This afternoon I was chatting on WeChat with a patient I have known for many years who has had two cancers (breast cancer and thyroid cancer), and I learned that she is doing well. I was happy for her, but also rather surprised. I first met her in the summer of 2016, when I was invited by a patient's family in Chengdu to visit his father and happened to see her. She had previously undergone surgery for breast cancer, and during the postoperative chemotherapy the doctor carelessly prescribed a nearly tenfold overdose of the chemotherapeutic drug. Not long after that chemotherapy session, she nearly died from severe side effects.

Her tumor later recurred, and this time she refused both surgery and chemotherapy. She asked me to help her with traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). Over the past few years, every time she went back for a follow-up, the hospital doctors held their breath on her behalf, because they always felt her tumor might soon progress to a life-threatening stage; after all, her tumors had previously recurred and enlarged quite rapidly.

I worried about her too, but she chose simply to ignore the tumor. She took the herbal medicine only sporadically—taking it for a while, then vanishing for a while, then miraculously getting back in touch after some time to ask for another round of treatment, only to disappear again afterward.

She decided for herself the course and intensity of treatment entirely according to what her body could tolerate, rather than following the doctors' advice. She did not follow the Western recommendation for surgery, nor did she continuously receive TCM treatment from me. Sometimes she would go for months without any medication at all, and when she felt her body could not take it, she would on her own stop treatment and simply wait for her body to recover on its own.

Yet her tumor actually shrank. The Western doctor who followed her up could hardly believe it, and I found it hard to believe too, but the tumor had indeed shrunk—or at least showed no sign of enlarging. In her daily life she practices tai chi. Of course, while she was practicing tai chi the tumor was still growing; once it grew, she would choose to be treated for a while, and once it stabilized she would forget about it again.

Six years have passed, and her condition is stable. She keeps house at home and cares for her elderly, demented father. Her physical state fluctuates, but most of the time she is just like a normal person.

Another patient took an even more passive approach. That patient had breast cancer that had metastasized to the brain. At a gathering in 2012, she fainted from the brain metastasis and was in critical condition. I used a large pin as an acupuncture needle, pricked her Shaoshang (Lu-11) and Shangyang (LI-1) points, and kept pressing on them until she came to. That was how I brought her around.

The patient told me later that it was the intense pain that brought her to her senses. She was probably right; it may well not have been that I pricked the correct acupoints. The ten fingers are linked to the heart, and Shaoshang and Shangyang are both on the fingers; being sharply pricked and held there with a pin really would jolt anyone awake.

When I saw her again at another gathering in 2017, she looked calm and serene. She found me in the crowd and thanked me for saving her five years earlier. She also told me that during those five years she had done nothing at all but use intention (yinian) to treat her brain metastasis. I believe most doctors who treat tumors would find this unbelievable, and I certainly do not believe that pricking her Shaoshang and Shangyang points once with a pin could have maintained a five-year effect. So when she stood in front of me talking like a normal person, what else could I do but marvel?

Then there was the father of my childhood friend, whom I met when I returned to my hometown. More than ten years earlier he had been diagnosed with advanced lymphoma. He completed five chemotherapy cycles but did not finish the full standard course. When the doctors recommended radiotherapy, he refused, because his family was destitute. He also tried TCM for a few months but gave up halfway because he could not afford the herbs. He is 79 this year; when I saw him in the village this time, he was in the fields sowing rapeseed. I asked him whether he had had any other treatment afterward, including folk remedies, and he said he had taken no measures at all and had simply left everything to fate.

As far as I know, the chemotherapy had not achieved complete remission, so the doctors at our local cancer hospital strongly urged him to continue chemotherapy and to have radiotherapy. I also urged him that if he gave up chemo and radiation, he must take TCM for two to three years. He ignored all of us and judged everything by how his own body felt. Besides, he really had no money for treatment; his only son was in prison, and he still had to look after his grandson and granddaughter. Where would the money for treatment have come from?

Another case was an ovarian cancer patient from Jingzhou, Hubei. In June 2017 she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer at Songzi People's Hospital. She underwent two palliative operations, neither of which fully removed the lesion. After surgery, her CA125 and CA724 remained persistently elevated. She refused further chemotherapy and came to me for TCM treatment. My results were not ideal, because her CA125 kept creeping up, rising by 5 to 10 with each follow-up. The patient was quite grudging about taking the herbs, constantly asking to stop the medication; she would only take the herbs when the CA125 rose too fast.

Many ovarian cancer patients who came to me around the same time used every modality at once—herbs, chemotherapy, immunotherapy—and most of them have since passed away. But this patient still lives a normal life in the countryside, playing cards and doing farm work every day.

If the goal of treating cancer is to extend survival, then these patients were undoubtedly successful. So to what extent should cancer be treated before one calls a halt or a pause? Are doctors' recommendations really scientific? How reliable is the evidence-based medicine we read in textbooks and the literature? These days I feel those are open questions.

I have seen many patients who were treated very aggressively, only to see their disease progress faster the more they were treated. In the book The Cheating Cell: How Evolution Helps Us Understand and Treat Cancer, the American cancer biologist Athena Aktipis points out: "Cancer is essentially a part of our own bodies, and we cannot completely eliminate it. If we view cancer as an enemy to be eradicated, then aggressive treatment seems like a good idea. But if we do not see clearly the nature of cancer—that cancer cells are diverse and evolve in response to every treatment we throw at them—we may underestimate, or even completely dismiss, the effects of gentler approaches."

Her words provide a reasonable explanation for why these passively coping cancer patients have survived so long. From a biological point of view, aggressive treatment imposes a form of artificial selection on cancer cells, driving them to rapidly evolve descendants that survive more effectively, grow larger tumors, and metastasize throughout the body, greatly shortening patients' survival. Passive—or gentle—measures, by contrast, let cancer cells progress more slowly, turning patients into big winners on the road to survival.

I feel ashamed that, under the psychological pressure brought by patients' progression, I often urged them to take more treatment, even though some of them resisted my advice. These suggestions of mine were less rational, responsible recommendations than a deep-seated desire to escape the sight of a patient's life slowly slipping away. After all, doctors do not want to watch a patient being consumed by cancer step by step, so it is hard to do nothing while the disease progresses. So now I have to admit that on the matter of cancer, doctors' advice is sometimes blind too.