The Role of Mental Strength in Cancer Treatment Is Beyond Belief

In 2013, the Sina Cancer Friends Circle held its seventh-anniversary gathering at Wanxian Mountain, Xinxiang, Henan, and I attended.

After the evening celebration began, an older woman from Beijing with advanced breast cancer, overcome with excitement, suddenly fainted. The situation was critical.

Among the circle members on hand were several medical workers, including me. Because I look very young, like a college student, in the confusion the others did not think I was up to first aid.

At first, other medical personnel handled the rescue, but it was not going well, and the patient seemed to be worsening.

Seeing the urgency, I cast aside any concern about appearances, found a large sewing needle to use as an acupuncture needle—I had not expected such an event on site and so carried no acupuncture needles.

I punctured the points Shaoshang (LU11) and Shangyang (LI1), two emergency points for fainting, and the patient came to.

Later, after she returned to Beijing, she had a checkup and found brain metastases. She told me this online, hoping the lab data she provided might help my future diagnosis and treatment.

In 2016, the Sina Cancer Friends Circle held its tenth anniversary in Tianjin, and this woman and I met again at the gathering.

I hardly recognized her, but she recognized me. In the crowd she found me, walked up, and thanked me for saving her life that year.

I was astonished she was still alive, and she seemed even more spirited than before.

I asked what treatment she had been receiving over the years. After that gathering, we had gone home and not seen each other again; she had not come to me for treatment, so I was curious what kind of treatment could have kept her alive so long with brain metastases.

She told me she had not had any treatment. She had treated herself through meditation, visualizing every day in her mind that her tumor was shrinking—and the tumor really did shrink.

I was stunned, and deeply doubted the truth of this. Although I knew in my heart she would not lie to a doctor who had saved her life, to be honest, from that 2016 meeting until a few days ago I remained half-skeptical.

Only recently, when I read Dr. Andrew Weil's book Spontaneous Healing, did I become convinced that what this woman told me was true.

In this world there are indeed quite a few terminally ill patients who, after being given up by doctors, have unexpectedly survived and recovered through sheer force of will to live.

I began, like Dr. Weil, to grow weary of the cold tone of the orthodox medical system.

I also realized that doctors are thoroughgoing pessimists—probably because they have seen so many deaths that many have been spiritually broken. I myself was once like that.

I have been reflecting on a question: how much of a counterproductive role do doctors actually play in diseases like cancer?

When this line of thinking began, I suddenly realized that a considerable number of terminally ill patients can be said to have been "murdered" by doctors and by public opinion.

From the moment a person is diagnosed and told they have cancer, their spirit and body begin to suffer relentless, destructive blows.

Doctors tell patients the situation is not good—it is cancer. Even if we immediately follow up by reassuring them that their case is relatively okay and there is hope, for the patient it is still a bolt from the blue. Their life changes utterly in that instant.

The fastest-dying patient I ever saw went from no obvious symptoms, to a cancer diagnosis, to death in less than a week. When she was diagnosed, her family came to me hoping for treatment, but some test results were not yet out, and I happened to be leaving Beijing for a few days to make a house call in Shanghai. By the time I returned from Shanghai, she had died.

Recently, a cousin-in-law of mine was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. In just a few days she went from feeling perfectly well to feeling unwell all over.

She had been found to have thyroid cancer only on a routine physical; before that she had no discomfort at all.

I used to advocate that patients know their condition—and, of course, I still advocate that cancer patients should know their condition.

But I think that when patients learn their diagnosis, it is best to have a psychologist help them. Otherwise, upon learning they have cancer, patients can plunge into a dark ice hole, unable to accept reality.

Doctors' pessimism is directly transmitted to cancer patients. As the greatest spiritual pillar after illness, doctors' attitudes, words, and moods deeply affect patients.

Unfortunately, under the current orthodox medical model, few doctors are able to help patients with an optimistic, positive frame of mind.

Through Andrew Weil's book I learned that even in America, oncologists are no different from Chinese doctors. We think American medicine is advanced and developed, but that is actually an illusion born of not knowing the inside story.

After a cancer diagnosis, patients suffer one mental blow after another. The pity of family and friends, and the chilling atmosphere of death pervading the information they cannot stop themselves from searching out, all take a severe psychological toll.

So there is no doubt that a considerable number of patients greatly shorten their survival because of psychological collapse. During treatment they meet many fellow patients, a fair number of whom die quickly; all they see and hear affects their own mood.

In our country, where psychologists and spiritual guides are scarce, most cancer patients are in terrible emotional shape. They hope doctors and fellow patients will give them "positive energy," but sadly what they receive is more often "negative energy."

There is no doubt that this series of mental shocks has a huge counterproductive effect on patients. A considerable proportion of cancer patients would, if their cancer had never been discovered, have lived far longer than they did after receiving so-called orthodox treatment.

The woman I once rescued, after passing through the gates of hell, gradually emerged from her initial fear, accepted her cancer diagnosis, and rebuilt her inner world, making it stronger than before. Having seen so many cases Dr. Weil collected of healing through spiritual meditation, I no longer doubt the truth of what she told me.

Such people do exist in this world. They are placed at the edge of death and then return to life, recovering through their own powerful mental strength.

The longer I practice medicine, the more I see that what is now regarded as orthodox medicine—both TCM and Western medicine—contains inexcusable absurdities. We close our eyes to a vast unknown world, using rigid dogma to deny everything beyond our field of vision.

Today, in my teaching, I say to my students: "I hope you study medicine seriously, exploring every field of both Chinese and Western medicine without sectarian bias. But after you have studied, you must doubt everything you have learned. Stay humble and open, ready at any time to accept new discoveries and revise your understanding in the face of evidence. Never assume that what you have learned is the truth."

For a very long time, doctors were treated as the "elders" of society; the public took their every word and deed as authority.

As the structural-functional anthropologist Malinowski said, each of us is a cog in society; from the moment we take our place, our function is already predetermined.

The social function of doctors is to heal the wounded and rescue the dying; doctors are patients' most reliable spiritual anchor. But do we physicians actually provide spiritual support to patients, or do we psychologically destroy them?

I think that in the current so-called orthodox medical model, at the very least oncologists fail to provide good spiritual support to cancer patients. From the very start, we dismantle the mental strength patients need to fight the disease.

The tiny number of cancer patients who create miracles through their own mental strength obtained that strength the hard way, from sources other than doctors; doctors deserve almost no credit.

If we define the ultimate purpose of medicine as healing the wounded and rescuing the dying, then physicians engaged in this work should not close their eyes to methods that help patients but are not included in so-called orthodox medicine.

The scholarship of healing is all-embracing; strictly speaking, any knowledge that can help patients belongs to the realm of medicine.

Medicine is both a technical discipline and a humanities discipline. A doctor ought to be a health helper and spiritual guide to the patient, relieving suffering, awakening the enormous self-healing power within the patient, and ultimately achieving the goal of healing.

Doctors who rely heavily on technology seriously lack humanistic literacy and can hardly meet the public's expectations of them.

Some respected physicians of the past—doctors like Ye Tianshi and Fu Qingzhu—were both physicians and spiritual leaders in rural society. The public not only came to them when ill but also asked them to arbitrate neighborhood disputes.

Patients in urgent need of self-rescue should clearly realize that their disease may be far less serious than they have been told. They should quickly cast off the cold words and data of the current imperfect medical system and the shadow hanging over them. Actively engage in spiritual self-rescue, or seek spiritual help, and resolutely reject the judgment that they will soon die.

It is never too late, at any time, for a patient to decide to pull themselves out of a state of psychological collapse.

Moreover, there is no doubt that when a patient shifts from a state of being psychologically destroyed to a state of vitality, their life will be extended to an incalculable degree.

Like the woman I once rescued, her survival time and quality far exceeded my estimate.

Living in happiness versus suffering, in confidence versus despair—the states are completely different, and the hope of recovery is utterly different too.

I have also been reflecting on how much "negative energy" I myself have brought to patients in recent years. Worried that after a patient's death their family would decide I was a dishonest doctor, I told patients and their families a great many cold hard numbers.

In reality, behind those cold numbers there are also large numbers of survivors.

To avoid liability, we have overemphasized the pessimistic side, so much so that from the very start we ourselves had no confidence in the patient's treatment. This tendency undoubtedly promotes patients' premature death.

Finally, I want to tell the stories of two other patients I treated.

The first patient had severe decay of the lower body from cancer. A powerful will to live led her to travel to Beijing three years ago to seek my care. The moment I saw her, my heart collapsed and I held out no hope of curing her.

I thought such a severe patient could hardly have three months to live, so I told her daughter, who had accompanied her, outside the room that a disease like her mother's certainly would not last three months, and told her not to torment her mother further by bringing her to Beijing to see me.

About a year later, this patient suddenly contacted me, asking whether her prescription needed adjusting. I was startled—she was still alive, and her condition had even improved. This filled me with shame.

The other patient was a Shandong breast cancer patient who came to me last year. Her tumor had ulcerated, blood and fluid streaming out, and from the ulcer one could almost see her internal organs.

When she lifted the gauze and I saw the lesion, a wave of despair hit me. I also said many pessimistic things to her, telling her that a ruptured breast tumor is very hard to treat and that I did not think she had long to live. I was escaping from treating her.

By the end of last year she was indeed bedridden and at death's door. But unexpectedly, driven by a powerful will to live, she kept taking the medicine I had prescribed, and this year she has improved day by day.

There was a time when I was confident in my own judgment, believing that the survival times I estimated based on medical textbooks and years of clinical experience were reliable.

After these events, I realized: doctors can never actually know exactly how long a patient has to live; there are always spiritually strong patients creating survival miracles.