Do Cancer Patients on TCM Treatment Need Regular Western-Medicine Re-examinations?

Do cancer patients receiving Chinese medicine need regular Western-medicine re-examinations? In most cases, the answer is yes. Because we need objective imaging and hematological examinations to determine the therapeutic effect, in order to assess whether the current treatment plan is working.

But for those end-stage cancer patients who choose Chinese medicine to improve their quality of life and extend survival, as long as symptoms are relieved and their condition is relatively stable, that is enough, and regular re-examination is meaningless. However, when such patients develop some relatively serious new symptoms—for example, a late-stage lung-cancer patient feeling chest tightness and shortness of breath, or certain abdominal tumors possibly causing intestinal adhesions—it is necessary to perform relevant examinations to determine whether there is pleural effusion and whether there are intestinal adhesions, so that the doctor can adjust the treatment plan in the next step.

Many cancer patients, after receiving TCM treatment, are unwilling, or are persuaded by certain TCM doctors, not to regularly undergo imaging and hematological examinations. Some people believe that TCM pulse diagnosis is more precise than modern instruments; this idea is wrong. Relying solely on TCM pulse diagnosis to make a diagnosis for a patient can easily delay the patient's condition. To be honest, I myself do not have the ability to judge, by pulse diagnosis alone, whether a tumor in a patient's body has shrunk or grown, nor have I ever seen a TCM doctor who has this ability. Some TCM doctors claim they have this ability, but it does not stand up to factual verification. Imaging examinations can tell at a glance whether a tumor has grown or shrunk, and hematological examinations can detect changes in relevant cancer markers; giving up this highly reliable examination method in favor of the unreliable pulse diagnosis is very irrational.

A few days ago there was a lung-cancer patient whose tumor had shrunk after receiving targeted therapy; later, because the second-generation drug became resistant, he did not try the third-generation drug and directly switched to TCM treatment. During the TCM treatment, he no longer underwent Western imaging and hematological examinations. As a result, after about a year, the patient developed liver metastasis. During the TCM treatment, the patient's symptoms improved markedly, but the tumor still progressed rapidly.

The patient's family consulted me about what had caused this. I told her it was because their insufficient understanding of medicine had led them to a mistaken belief and delayed the condition.

Ordinary people can easily mistake improvement in clinical symptoms for the tumor being controlled, and some TCM doctors comfort patients in this way. In fact, improving clinical symptoms and controlling the tumor are two different things. Improving clinical symptoms is sometimes merely a satisfactory result of drug treatment for tumor complications—for example, controlling pleural effusion or cancer fever—but it does not mean the patient's tumor is controlled.

This is not to say that TCM treatment cannot control tumors; in fact, some patients' tumors are controlled or even disappear after TCM treatment. I myself have successful experience in this regard, although the success rate is not high. But the efficacy in these patients can also only be confirmed by examination with modern medical instruments.

Often, treatment that controls the tumor makes patients feel miserable, because most tumor-controlling drugs have a certain toxicity. Not only Western chemotherapy drugs and targeted drugs have a certain toxicity, but TCM anti-cancer herbs also have a certain toxicity. While these anti-cancer drugs strike cancer cells, they also damage the body's normal cells, bringing a certain degree of discomfort to the patient.

If the patient's condition has not yet reached the end stage, clinical treatment should pursue control of the tumor as much as possible. The wish of "living with the tumor" is a beautiful one, but unless the tumor's size remains unchanged or its growth rate slows considerably, otherwise, in most cases, "living with the tumor" is nothing but a self-deception. As the space-occupying lesion progresses, the patient will eventually pass away because the cancerous mass is too large.

Of course, treating tumors is a very complex matter. Some patients have already missed the opportunity to control tumor progression, with no available anti-cancer Chinese or Western protocols; at such a time, giving the patient TCM support-healthy (fuzheng) treatment to alleviate the patient's suffering as much as possible, without considering the issue of survival time, is a more rational choice. In this situation, there is no need for regular re-examination; one only needs to provide good hospice care and delay the progression of the condition as far as possible.

For some families in financial difficulty, undergoing expensive Western examinations and treatment, or using some expensive anti-cancer Chinese herbs, is also unrealistic. Some patients seek TCM treatment purely for economic reasons; such patients should also be judged by a different standard. For extremely needy patients, using Chinese medicines that are far cheaper than Western drugs is a realistic choice. Although the success rate of treatment may be greatly affected, it is still better than giving up treatment entirely. There are quite a large number of impoverished cancer patients in our country; this is a very helpless reality.

So, whether regular re-examination is needed during treatment depends on the specific circumstances.