Recently my stamina has fully recovered; when doing endurance exercise, my physical fitness is back to its peak. Among more than 40,000 stationary-bike participants, I rank in the top eighty, surpassing 99.8% of participants, entering the top two-tenths of a percent. Having monitored my blood pressure for several days running, it is normal, and my body has no discomfort.Starting from the seventh day of the first lunar month, I said to myself that I could not go on working so hard; I had to slow the pace of life. Since then, I have turned away many patients and politely refused consultations outside my research scope. The COVID patients I had treated before have all gradually recovered; work pressure began to ease bit by bit, and I again had time for a midday nap and for reading.Once the patients requiring round-the-clock worry decreased, my sleep quality improved greatly. Before the Lantern Festival, every night before falling asleep, or before the midday nap, I would use the hair dryer for a while. After warming the body, I fall asleep quickly and sleep much better. After a few good nights' sleep, the tachycardia was gone.For a while, worrying that critically ill patients might die at any moment, I could barely sleep well at night; waking in the small hours, I kept turning over the patients' conditions, afraid of the slightest slip—a medical accident is no joke. Some patients had underlying diseases I had not known about, so I had to look up a good deal of material to judge what risks the patient might face next. The work of those days truly left me utterly drained.Exercise is also being gradually resumed. The calories burned in 30 minutes of cycling rose from over 300 kcal to over 400 kcal, and then gradually to over 750 kcal—the peak level I was at before the epidemic. The app data shows that over 99% of people doing the same exercise cannot reach my intensity. Over the past three years, the epidemic did indeed impact my life to some degree, but it also cultivated in me the habit of persistent exercise, which is a great gain.Besides rest and exercise, I am also keeping up dietary therapy—persisting with medication is very hard for me; usually I only take a few days of medicine when symptoms are fairly obvious, so dietary therapy is the better choice for me.Jiaotou (pronounced jiao, fourth tone) is the vegetable I have eaten most this period, because jiaotou is the Xiebai of Chinese medicine. Xiebai is a main herb TCM uses for cardiovascular problems caused by stasis and blockage of the aorta and coronary arteries, and it is also a very common vegetable in our Yangtze River basin. Rather than take medicine, eat vegetables.Jiaotou stir-fried with small millet chilies is delicious; this dish, which I ate as a child but rarely saw after growing up and moving north, goes very well with rice. After eating jiaotou, one's spirit and stamina improve, and bowel movements become much smoother. But we have known since childhood that eating too much jiaotou makes one fart a lot, so we do not dare eat too much—only one or two liang a day.My wife has familial hypertension; although I used Chinese medicine to bring her blood pressure below 140, it was still above 120. After eating jiaotou with me for a while, her blood pressure dropped below 120, which really delighted us. Although China's medical field currently defines blood pressure above 139 as hypertension, in fact a systolic pressure above 120 already counts as hypertension. Because those with a systolic pressure above 120, even if below 140, still have more than a 10% higher risk of stroke than those whose systolic pressure is below 120.On February 14, 2023, the American journal JAMA Network Open published findings from a study by Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, which showed that COVID patients who developed diabetes after contracting the novel coronavirus were nearly three times as many as new diabetes patients before the epidemic; the new hypertension and high-cholesterol patients were twice as many.
The researchers, during the period when Omicron had become the dominant strain, studied nearly 24,000 confirmed patients and found that, within 90 days after diagnosis, the rates of newly diagnosed diabetes, hypertension, and elevated cholesterol clearly increased. Getting the COVID vaccine seemed to help lower these risks, because compared with unvaccinated people, those vaccinated had roughly the same risk of developing diabetes before and after infection, while the risk of other diseases decreased.
Many foods lower blood pressure, blood sugar, and blood lipids, yet people prefer the foods that easily cause the three highs. So after contracting COVID, adjusting one's diet is also important. Besides jiaotou, I also often drink tea brewed from dried hawthorn slices; hawthorn lowers blood lipids, blood sugar, and blood pressure and protects the cardiovascular system, similar in effect to jiaotou.
Recently I reread Healing and the Mind (formerly translated as Spontaneous Healing) by the American doctor Andrew Weil, and gained a great deal, strongly agreeing with some of his views. Andrew Weil is an MD who graduated from Harvard Medical School, but he is more interested in alternative medicine, including TCM, and can give fair assessments of the effects of various conventional and unconventional medical methods.
If we entrust all our health problems to modern medicine instead of activating our own self-healing ability, we may never recover. Activating one's self-healing ability includes adjusting one's routine, regulating one's emotions, eating healthy food, drinking healthy water, doing suitable exercise, and choosing some seemingly unconventional but very effective recovery methods.
Andrew Weil says that for the vast majority of the time humans have existed on this planet, there were no doctors to care for us; medicine has appeared only in the last few thousand years, and for the millions of years before, humans relied on their own self-healing ability to overcome disease. The food we eat, the exercise we do, our sleep, our emotions, our social relationships, all have a profound influence on our health. Only by realizing all this and adjusting everything in our lives can we regain health.
After COVID, my understanding of medicine has also changed a great deal, which may greatly influence my future approach to treatment. We inevitably must coexist with pathogens such as viruses, bacteria, and cancer cells; these we cannot exterminate. Finding ways to coexist with them is more practically meaningful than finding ways to wipe them out.
Humans have never been absolutely healthy; so-called health is only relative. Moreover, our disease problems cannot rely too much on medicine; if we do not exert our own initiative and learn how to survive better under the influence of a challenging natural environment, then no matter how advanced medicine becomes, it cannot stop us from falling ill and dying prematurely.
Take COVID, for example; more and more scientists now recognize that its effects on human health will be long-term, and many effects we do not foresee may yet occur. But like other pathogenic factors, it is only one of several elements affecting our health, and it needs to combine with our bad habits to cause disease. If we adjust ourselves in time, the novel coronavirus alone may not necessarily cause illness.
The same is true of cancer cells; their development also depends on many other conditions, and a single factor cannot let cancer cells run rampant. So exploring unconventional recovery methods for cancer is also a very meaningful undertaking.
Health problems are both complex and simple; only by fully activating our self-recovery program and then, when unavoidable, using medicine in moderation, can we truly regain health.