The "Cocktail Therapy" for Cancer

Doctor zhou
Drug resistance is a common phenomenon in cancer treatment. Because cancer cells are constantly proliferating and evolving, they mutate during proliferation; daughter cancer cells are not genetically identical to parent cells. Therefore, drugs effective against the parent cells may not remain effective against some daughter cells. Those daughter cells that escape the attack of anticancer drugs proliferate rapidly, causing a treatment regimen that was once effective to fail after a period of use.
Not only commonly used anticancer Western drugs develop resistance; Chinese herbs do too. Many patients tell me that herbs prescribed by a certain TCM physician were effective at first, but after a while stopped working. Some patients then become doubtful, wondering whether the earlier test results that showed effectiveness were wrong. In fact, it is not that the test results were wrong, but that the cancer cells developed resistance to the herbs being taken.
AIDS treatment has the same problem. HIV mutates rapidly, and mutated daughter viruses develop resistance to previously effective drugs, also leading to treatment failure. The Chinese-American scientist Dr. David Ho therefore invented the AIDS cocktail therapy to solve this problem, greatly improving the clinical efficacy of AIDS treatment and significantly extending AIDS patients' lifespans.
What are the characteristics of Dr. Ho's cocktail therapy? In clinical practice, Dr. Ho found that using a single antiviral drug had limited effect, but combining two or more antiviral drugs and reverse-transcriptase inhibitors effectively curbed the speed of HIV replication. This therapy invented by Dr. David Ho became known as cocktail therapy. Cocktail therapy is ubiquitous in modern medicine; for example, the common "triple therapy" or "quadruple therapy" for

Helicobacter pylori

is based on the same idea.
HIV can produce hundreds of millions of new viruses in the human body every day, and in the process a large number mutate. If only one drug is used, resistance develops rapidly. The cocktail therapy invented by Dr. David Ho greatly delays the onset of resistance.
In my many years of cancer research, I have also found that cancer cells mutate as readily as HIV; once a gene mutation occurs, they easily develop resistance to previous treatment regimens. Applying a multi-drug, cocktail-style approach to cancer patients can effectively prolong survival and slow recurrence.
We should therefore encourage eligible cancer patients to accept this combination therapy and abandon their reliance on single therapy. Gene mutation in cancer cells is an entirely unavoidable natural phenomenon, but the combination approach of cocktail therapy can simultaneously inhibit both parent and daughter cancer cells in the body, making it less likely that cancer cells will break through the defenses set for them; it is therefore not surprising that this therapy can efficiently prolong patients' lives.
In recent years, when selecting anticancer Chinese herbs, I have also followed the principle of multi-target用药, using large compound formulas to treat patients. Practice has shown that this approach is effective for some patients. But as for which specific herbs will be effective against which particular tumor, I currently lack systematic research.
The Japanese Kampo physician Yoshimasu Tōdō, by sorting through ancient physicians'用药经验, summarized the actions and effects of commonly used Chinese herbs and wrote the book

Yakushō

(Pharmaceutical Evidence), pioneering the use of statistical methods in Japanese Kampo research on herbal efficacy.
His research also laid the foundation for the Japanese Kampo emphasis on clinical evidence, which is why Yoshimasu Tōdō himself is regarded as the "Mount Tai" of the Japanese Kampo schools of "formula-pattern" (hōshō) and "herb-evidence" (yakushō) — what Chinese people call a towering authority.
But because of the TCM world's consistent conservative tendency, this commendable innovative spirit has not been widely recognized, which is why clinical evidence-based research on Chinese herbs still has vast gaps to this day. Personally, I believe that Chinese medicine practitioners in China should in the future value the application of statistics to TCM clinical outcomes and accumulate clinical evidence. Only in this way can we connect future TCM with the scientific spirit.
If we had such data, we would in the future have a scientific basis for developing a TCM cocktail therapy for cancer, and the clinical efficacy rate of future anticancer formulas would be greatly improved. But accomplishing this task through individual effort alone is unrealistic; medical experience is the fruit of collective wisdom.
TCM compound formulas have an innate similarity with "cocktail therapy." From ancient times to the present, TCM has rarely used single herbs to treat disease; most TCM prescriptions consist of two or more herbs.
The

Shennong Bencao Jing

used the principle of the seven relationships of herb compatibility to organize a complete prescription; this is a very scientific method. It is just that, as times change and our understanding of disease becomes clearer, TCM also needs to move a step forward on the basis of the

Shennong Bencao Jing

, incorporating elements of modern science in order to achieve more precise and more clinically effective results.

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