Summer's End: A Season of Growth

Summer vacation is drawing to a close, and it has been a remarkably rewarding one.

The break is over. Tomorrow I return to school to register, and the day after, classes officially begin.

This summer lasted 54 days — an exceptionally long holiday. I went home and stayed with my father for nine days, the longest stretch I've spent in my hometown in years. During that time, I went fishing once at the spot I used to frequent most as a child. Fishing was my favorite outdoor activity back then, but going now, I found it dull and a waste of time. In a way, this fulfilled a long-held wish of mine: the childhood joy I had always cherished so nostalgically, when actually revisited, turned out to be nothing more than that.

We grow continuously. In the process, some old hobbies are inevitably abandoned while new ones take their place. The old ones are best kept for nostalgia; there is no need to force oneself back into the past.

Our family had planned a trip to Yunnan on August 19, with round-trip tickets already purchased. But due to the sudden passing of my father's cousin, I had to return home for his funeral, and the trip was called off. There was no other chance this summer to take my wife and son traveling; I hope to make it up during winter break.

All the remaining time I devoted to writing, organizing my old medical articles, revamping my website, and collaborating on animal experiments with two laboratories — one in Shanghai and one in Henan. With a PhD researcher in Shanghai, I am conducting animal experiments on cholangiocarcinoma; with a PhD researcher in Henan, on lung cancer; and with a PhD researcher in Guangdong, I am preparing to begin animal experiments on pancreatic cancer.

This has been a highly productive summer. I have written quite a few articles, and in particular I have begun systematically writing a book to organize my clinical thinking. Beyond that, I have been designing experiments to validate it, and refining it based on practical results.

Because of my own mother's illness, I have been engaged in research on refractory diseases for over twenty years. In 2012, I formally completed registration as a traditional Chinese medicine apprentice, and counting from then, I have walked that path for more than a decade. Before that, out of personal interest, I had also systematically studied psychiatry.

I am now a second-year student majoring in clinical medicine. If all goes well, after graduating, I plan to take the national college entrance examination once more — to enroll in a school close enough that I can commute home every day, and study acupuncture and tuina for three years. This would complete my overall study plan and round out my knowledge structure.

I am deeply dissatisfied with how contemporary medical education divides medicine into isolated blocks. I have long wanted to understand health and disease from a comprehensive perspective. I used to hope that young medical students would have the courage to study across disciplines for a few extra years, to acquire broader medical knowledge and avoid the bias and shortsightedness of the blind men touching the elephant.

Later I realized that compared to those eighty-year-old veteran experts, I am the young one — I should take action myself rather than pinning my hopes on others.

My original research focus was advanced-stage cancer and sequelae of stroke. In recent years, due to illnesses in other family members, I have expanded into Alzheimer's disease and hereditary hypertension. These conditions all fall under refractory diseases, for which the current global medical community achieves less-than-ideal outcomes. Without innovative thinking, conquering such diseases is essentially impossible.

Those who work in this field must possess innovative awareness and thinking — qualities that have always been scarce. I happen to have a measure of that, so perhaps I was born suited for this work. I also enjoy it; I have no interest in the tedious repetition of others' results. Humans were given brains to experience the joy of thinking. If one has never known that joy, one has wasted the very function nature has bestowed.

I am different from typical medical researchers. I came to medicine mid-career; before that, I was in business leveraging IT technology. So in choosing the path for medical research and promoting my ideas, I do not rely on traditional models — I need not publish papers, nor do I seek institutional identity. As long as the research yields results, I can promote them myself.

When it comes to building an audience, as a former businessman with an IT background, I alone can outperform the entire staff of many academic journals. The traffic to my website and WeChat public account far exceeds that of most medical journals. Among personal websites worldwide, my site ranks in the top 1%.

As a child, I naively wanted to change the world. Now I only aspire to have a limited impact on the world within my capabilities — a goal that is relatively achievable. We live in an era of advanced technology, and technology can help us accomplish this, so mastering it is crucial.

This summer, with the help of programmer friends and AI, I learned new web development technologies and successfully revamped my website. I also used AI translation to build multilingual versions of the site, and traffic to those versions is gradually growing. Along the way, my AI application skills have also advanced to a new level.

Twenty-eight years ago, when I first entered university, such a scenario would have been unimaginable. Back then, for an author to spread ideas worldwide, they had to rely on the collaboration of many people. Today, the author can accomplish all of this single-handedly. Technology has brought many social problems, but it has also brought an efficiency revolution. With its help, the work I most want to do can be done entirely in my beloved remote countryside, without running from place to place.

As of June this year, my Chinese website receives over 20,000 visitors per day, with 40,000 to 50,000 article views daily. For a medical researcher, these are very good numbers. Most gratifying of all, everything has been achieved without asking favors from anyone — which allows me to maintain an independent character and a free spirit, without having to live under another's thumb.

These numbers mean that my aspiration to have a limited impact on the world within my capabilities is no longer a dream, but an established reality. As long as I am alive, this impact will continue to grow, because technology has a cumulative effect.

My cousin says I have always been "doing worldly affairs with a transcendent heart" — a very apt summary. In my personal life, I do lean toward a Daoist style, advocating minimalism and keeping a friendly distance from the world. But at my core, I am more inclined toward the Confucian spirit of striving, never giving up the effort to make an impact. Since idling is just idling anyway, why not do what one can to make the world a little more to our own satisfaction?

The revamped website and the new multilingual versions hold greater technical advantages. I expect that in the coming years, daily traffic will continue to double. Meanwhile, my medical research will also enter deeper waters, and the quality of the medical articles I write is expected to steadily improve.

I have both clear plans for my future and clear predictions grounded in real data. I do not worry that my research will fall into obscurity. This confidence comes from the overall improvement in my abilities through years of personal effort. I am deeply grateful to my teachers for cultivating me into a person with well-rounded abilities rather than a one-sided specialist — this has given me the freedom to choose my own path and a relatively less dogmatic way of thinking.

One's cognitive ability is closely tied to the breadth and depth of the knowledge and skills one possesses. When knowledge is confined to a narrow field, one inevitably becomes a person of prejudice. It is simply that in our era, most such prejudiced people lack self-awareness and feel quite good about themselves — but that does not prevent prejudice from harming them. In medicine, prejudice often costs lives, which is especially tragic.

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