“The Experts Say”: On Blind Belief in TCM Gurus on TV
A male colleague of my wife's is obsessed with TCM health-preserving TV shows. Like many Beijing locals, after watching a program he likes to go to the pharmacy and buy some of the medicines the “experts” recommend for health preservation. He kept this habit for N years; reportedly his drawers are always full of this or that herbal medicine. On a summer physical exam his creatinine was found elevated, and the doctor warned of impaired kidney function. He didn't pay much attention; a month or two later it rapidly progressed to kidney failure, and he had to be hospitalized.
Whenever the Yang Sheng Tang (Life Nurturing Hall) program on Beijing TV recommends a certain medicine, the next day that medicine sells out at TCM pharmacies all over Beijing, with crowds of TCM enthusiasts queuing to buy it. I have witnessed this several times; once it was the rush on Zhima Huanglian (Coptis), and the scene was spectacular. Asking around, I learned that some big-name expert on Yang Sheng Tang had recommended it.
The female host of Yang Sheng Tang has a truly poor medical literacy and cannot recognize what harmful influence her words may have on people, but because she is skilled at stirring emotion she has influenced quite a few people, and has even parlayed that fame into money by publishing health books. The male colleague I mentioned—an overworked Beijing male teacher, long in a sub-health state—could not afford to go to a hospital, believed in similar TV programs and street-corner health books, and ended up with kidney failure.
Another elderly woman believed the TV experts' claim that even healthy people have cancer cells, and then from somewhere obtained the “divine anti-cancer formula” composed of Baihuasheshecao (Oldenlandiae Herba), Banzhilian (Scutellariae Barbatae Herba), Tieshuye (Cycadis Folium), and Dazao (Jujubae Fructus). Out of fear of cancer, she hoped to use this divine formula to kill the cancer cells in her body—and ended up with liver necrosis.
Many patients I see often say to me, “The circle-circle-circle says, yin deficiency with effulgent fire should be treated this way, yang deficiency that way, liver-kidney insufficiency still another way.” When I ask them to describe their own condition, technical terms pour out—terms like cold uterus and yang deficiency that shock me to the core. They then look at me with suspicion, and I cannot tell whether they distrust my clinical diagnosis or hope to test me on the spot. “Circle-circle-circle” here is a generic reference: it includes all kinds of TV programs, all kinds of health masters, all kinds of experts titled “national physician” or “grand physician,” and even the various online body-constitution-testing apps (oh my god, how high-end!), or the “imperial physicians” in hit TV dramas like Empresses in the Palace.
At moments like this, I feel that a torchbearer of anti-TCM sentiment like Fang Zhouzi is truly necessary. Although I, who love TCM, almost entirely reject his judgments about it, I feel that his anti-TCM cause has nevertheless made many people recognize the harms of abusing TCM.
Once my wife went to see an old TCM physician, who wrote her a big prescription and then told her: “Take it without worry; Chinese medicine has no side effects; these are all tonics very good for the body.” I tore up the prescription before I was even out of his sight; I saw the old man's face, forcibly suppressing his annoyance. If a physician exploits the public's superstitious attitudes toward Chinese medicine and materia medica to spread fallacies, he has no ethics at all.
In practice, when I encounter such patients who are forever quoting “the circle-circle-circle says,” and after I reason with them I can still feel their deep doubt, I politely decline them. This is a social problem—perhaps a social problem that exists only in the Chinese-speaking world, because in countries where Western medicine prevails, TCM “masters” have no market.
I myself am in the process of becoming one of the “circle-circle-circles”: I often publish various articles about TCM online, and some patients may well elevate my words to that high-end platform of “the circle-circle-circle says.” This makes me uneasy. Who knows whether someone in the future might sacrifice his health by blindly believing some sentence I have uttered?
Don't be so quick to be superstitious, dear friends!