Should Cancer Patients Adopt a Vegetarian Diet and Sexual Abstinence?
Some cancer patients, after falling ill, are easily influenced by religion and become ascetics and vegetarians, carrying their lives to an extreme and resulting in malnutrition both physically and mentally, which is very unfavorable to recuperation. I write this article to set forth my personal views on this question.
To date, no evidence has proven that a completely vegetarian diet is beneficial to cancer recovery. There was once a son of a cancer patient who, after his mother was treated for two years with modern medicine for lymphoma, wrote a book strongly advocating vegetarianism, believing that his mother's cancer had been conquered by a vegetarian diet.
From a professional standpoint, this statement is very unsound. Two years after cancer treatment, whether vegetarian or not, a great many patients survive well without recurrence. To observe whether a cancer patient relapses, one must observe for five years, ten years, or even longer. Quite apart from this being an isolated case, the time span alone is insufficient to draw any conclusion of cure. I certainly hope his mother recovers, but I do not wish such a taken-for-granted notion to captivate the majority of cancer patients.
Tumors consume the body's nutrients. Many cancer patients, as the cancer progresses, develop anemia and malnutrition. Moderate supplementation of meat foods greatly benefits the patient's physical condition. Not every bodily problem is best solved by medication. Among the advanced cancer patients I have treated with TCM who have survived more than five years, I have not imposed overly strict dietary prohibitions on any of them. I only tell them not to eat seafood and other easily allergenic foods, nor the folk "facilitating-pathogenic" foods such as rooster and carp; as for the rest—fish, meat, and eggs—they may eat some. If conditions allow, eating more natural foods is of course better; if not, buying some from the market is also fine. The diet should be balanced and should not be too vegetarian.
Some patients, out of religious belief, refuse to kill living beings, and then it is hard to change their value orientation. After all, this faith is the spiritual pillar by which they live, and others cannot shake it. I myself count as a Buddhist; from my own observation, religious belief can indeed change a person's state of mind, but it need not prolong a person's life. Bigoted religious believers, on the contrary, are in an extremely unhealthy physical and mental state.
As for sexual abstinence, I believe this is also one of those taken-for-granted anticancer methods, lacking any strong scientific evidence. In my contact with patients, I have encountered a great many ascetics. The most wonderful thing in this world is the sexual love between man and woman, but this same sexual love can also bring endless troubles. If this sexual love were only pleasurable and not troublesome, I would be entirely opposed to asceticism. Indulging in dissipation is of course not advisable, but completely closing off one's fleshly desires is also a warfare between heaven and man, leaving body and mind no peace.
TCM holds that human emotions can cause illness, but among these emotions is not included the sexual desire of mutual affection. The sexual desire of mutual affection not only does not cause a person to be physically and mentally unhealthy, but on the contrary makes one spirited and vital, and is favorable to physical and mental recovery. Some patients, after abstaining, easily fall into depression, and their thoughts easily go to extremes. Human beings, by their nature, need to receive care, sympathy, and understanding. In the course of mutually affectionate sexual life, a person's negative emotions can be released to the greatest extent. Abstinence cuts off this avenue of release and is not rational.
I hold the view that any excessively extreme notion should not be readily believed or adopted. The Confucian classical saying goes: "Be broad and great, yet exact and minute; be most high and brilliant, yet follow the path of the mean." Living in this world, fundamentally, we must be in a harmonious state with our own inner heart, our own nature, and the outer world, before body and mind can find peace. Pursuing the extreme ultimately falls short, as excess is as bad as deficiency. Treating illness and recuperating follow the same principle: everything is best when stopped at the proper measure.