The Summer Vacation Is Ending; This Summer Has Been Rewarding

Summer vacation is over; tomorrow I return to school to register, and the day after classes officially begin.

This vacation lasted 54 days, which counts as an extra-long break. I went home and spent nine days with my father—the longest stretch I have spent in my hometown in years. During that time I also went once to a place I frequented as a child to fish; fishing was my favorite outdoor activity when I was small, but now that I have gone back, it feels bland and a waste of time. It did, however, settle a long-standing wish of mine: the childhood happiness I had always so cherished, when actually experienced again, turned out to be no more than that.

A person keeps growing, and in growing, old hobbies are abandoned and new ones take their place. The old ones are fine to remember; there is no need to force oneself back into the past.

The whole family's planned August 19 trip to Yunnan—round-trip tickets already bought—had to be given up because my cousin's sudden death required me to go home for his funeral. There will be no more chance this summer to travel with my wife and child; I hope the winter break can make up for it.

All the remaining time I spent writing and organizing my old medical articles, redesigning my website, and collaborating on animal experiments with two laboratories in Shanghai and Henan. With a PhD in Shanghai I am doing a cholangiocarcinoma animal experiment; with a PhD in Henan, a lung-cancer animal experiment; and with a PhD in Guangdong I am preparing to start a pancreatic-cancer animal experiment.

This has been a highly productive summer. I wrote a good many articles during these days and, in particular, began systematically writing a book that organizes my clinical thinking. More than that, I tried designing experiments to verify it and using practical results to revise it.

Because of my own mother's illness, I have been doing research on refractory diseases for more than twenty years. In 2012 I formally completed the paperwork for the TCM apprenticeship track; counting from then, I have walked the TCM-apprenticeship road for more than ten years. Before that, out of interest, I had also systematically studied psychiatry.

Now I am a second-year clinical-medicine major. If all goes well, after graduating in clinical medicine I should sit the college entrance exam once more, get into a school where I can come home every day, and study acupuncture and tuina for three years. That will complete my full study plan and round out my knowledge structure.

I am extremely dissatisfied with how contemporary medical education carves the various fields of medicine into large separate blocks; I have long wanted to understand health and disease from a comprehensive perspective. In the past I hoped that young medical learners would have the courage to cross disciplines and study a few more years, mastering broader medical knowledge and avoiding the prejudice and shortsightedness of blind men touching an elephant.

Later I realized that, compared with those eighty-year-old senior experts, I myself am the young person; I should act myself rather than pin my hopes on others.

My original research direction was advanced cancer and stroke sequelae; in recent years, because of illnesses of other family members, it has expanded to Alzheimer's disease and hereditary hypertension. These are all refractory diseases, and worldwide medicine currently treats them all with unsatisfying results. Without innovative thinking, such diseases are basically impossible to conquer.

Those who till this field must have an innovative consciousness and innovative thinking—and innovative consciousness and thinking have always been scarce. I happen to have a little of it, so perhaps I am naturally suited to this work. I also enjoy doing this kind of research; I have no interest in the dry, repetitive work of others. The human brain exists to experience the joy of thinking; if one has never experienced the joy of thinking, one has wasted this function nature gave us.

I am not like the ordinary medical researcher. I came to medicine by a roundabout route; before that I was in business using IT technology. So in choosing how to pursue medical research and spread medical ideas, I do not rely on the traditional model—I do not need to publish papers, nor do I need an institutional identity. As long as I can work out the research, I can spread it.

When it comes to driving traffic, an ex-businessman like me who once worked in IT can outperform, single-handedly, all the staff of many journals. My websites and public accounts get far more visits than most medical journals; among personal websites worldwide, mine ranks in the top 1%.

As a child I naively wanted to change the world; now I only pursue having a limited influence on the world within my own ability. This goal is relatively easy to achieve. We live in a technologically developed age, and technology can help us do this, so mastering technology well is crucial.

This summer, with the help of programmer friends and AI, I learned new website-development techniques and successfully redesigned my site. I also used AI's translation function to build multilingual websites, whose traffic is gradually growing. Along the way I also raised my level of AI application.

Twenty-eight years ago, when I first entered university, such a scene was unimaginable. In those days, for an author to spread his ideas worldwide, he had to rely on the cooperation of many people. Today, the author himself can easily do it all. Technology has brought many social problems, but it has indeed brought an efficiency revolution. With technology's help, the things I most want to do can be completed right here in my favorite remote village, without traveling everywhere.

As of this June, my Chinese-language website is visited by more than 20,000 people a day, and its articles are viewed 40,000–50,000 times a day. For a medical researcher, that is a very good number. Most gratifying of all, all of this can be accomplished without begging others; this lets me maintain an independent personality and a free spirit, without depending on others' favor.

These numbers mean that my hope of having a limited influence on the world within my ability is no longer a dream but an established reality. As long as I am alive, this influence will even keep growing, because technology has a cumulative effect.

My cousin says I have always done worldly things with an otherworldly heart; that summary is spot-on. In personal life I do lean toward the Taoist style, advocating minimalism and keeping a friendly distance from the world; but deep down I lean toward the Confucian spirit of striving, never giving up the effort to influence the world. Since I have time on my hands anyway, why not do as much as possible to make the world a little more to our liking?

The newly redesigned website and the newly built multilingual sites are technically more advantageous; over the next few years my daily traffic is expected to keep doubling. At the same time, my medical research will move into deeper waters, and the quality of the medical articles I write over the next few years is expected to keep rising.

I have both a clear plan for my future and a clear forecast based on real data. I do not worry that the research I do will sink into obscurity; this confidence comes from the overall improvement in my abilities that years of personal effort have brought. I am grateful to my teachers for cultivating me into a person of broad, well-rounded ability rather than a one-sided specialist; this gives me the freedom to choose my own path in life and a relatively less rigid way of seeing things.

A person's cognitive ability is closely tied to the breadth and depth of the knowledge and skills he has mastered. When a person's knowledge is confined to a narrow field, he inevitably becomes a bigot. It is just that in our age, most such bigots lack insight and feel fine about themselves; but that does not prevent prejudice from harming them. Prejudice in medicine often exacts the price of life, which is especially heartbreaking.

I hope, in my lifetime, to do something to change this state of affairs—for myself, for my family, and for others. So my research and writing will continue, wherever I may go in future.