The Unhealthy Health Industry
Every day I receive a flood of recommended articles from WeChat friends—health articles with sensational titles. Most are clickbait pieces written by self-media accounts for marketing purposes, and over 95% of them are not worth reading. Such articles borrow the prestige of some so-called expert as a tiger's skin and peddle extreme medical ideas. Over time, I set the friends who love sending me such articles to "do not disturb" and simply ignore whatever they recommend.
I never had the chance to meet the older generation of TCM masters, but I have dealt directly or indirectly with many of today's renowned TCM physicians, and know their writings, ideas, and therapeutic results well. A great many articles written in their names are simply using these famous doctors as a tiger's skin while in reality running follower-gathering marketing campaigns. The authors mostly either quote out of context or deliberately make things sound miraculous, manufacturing sensational effects to sway ordinary people who know little about medicine into being carried away.
Such behavior is deeply unethical, because these articles mislead too many patients and their families. Countless patients or family members with poor judgment will go astray because of such articles, which threatens the health and lives of some sufferers. I myself have treated a good many patients who died because they wrongly trusted such clickbait articles.
This is only a microcosm of today's health industry. Some people running health self-media know little about medicine and spread views that harm people, yet they stop at nothing for personal gain. In cancer circles there is no shortage of articles obviously harmful to people—such as starvation therapy, anti-cancer "alkaline body," anti-cancer potato juice, or the claim that a single folk remedy of banzhilian (Scutellaria barbata) and baihuasheshecao (Hedyotis diffusa) solves all cancer problems. With eye-catching titles and inflammatory writing, such articles spread widely. When patients and their families cannot tell right from wrong, some take desperate gambles and try them; the great majority end up damaging their liver, stomach, or kidneys, and some even drop dead suddenly.
Here in Beijing, I often meet entrepreneurs who know nothing about medicine but hold forth on the prospects of the big health industry, charging in full of fight to strike gold in it, and some very much want to recruit me. I generally stay highly wary of such invitations. The medical-health industry is a matter of life and death; if one enters it purely for commercial gain, most people will eventually, wittingly or unwittingly, do a great deal that harms patients. Making money is secondary; what is worse is misleading patients and their families and threatening patients' lives and health.
Every year in China more than a hundred thousand patients die needlessly from improper medication, and a fair number of them owe their deaths to all kinds of misleading pseudo-medical popular-science articles and to various "well-meaning people." There are always plenty of "well-meaning people" around us who lack judgment themselves but love enthusiastically recommending medication regimens to sick relatives and friends. After encountering a great many patients misled in this way, I was, for quite a long time, deeply depressed.
The health industry is said to be one of today's most promising big cakes, and many want a slice. The threshold for entering the big health industry is also low, and the entry of large numbers of unscrupulous practitioners has made the industry's development chaotic. In the end this may add yet more negative labels to an already stigmatized medical-health industry, leaving a very poor impression on the public and having a very bad effect on people's lives and health.
I always advise the patients and families I can reach directly to read as few articles and videos in the media as possible, and to be all the more wary the more miraculous they sound. I suggest that, in the course of treatment, they stay away from television, the internet, and other media as much as possible, avoid being influenced by all kinds of harmful ideas, find doctors of professional integrity, and receive proper, rigorous medical treatment.
I believe most doctors, in clinical practice, encounter, as I do, patients and families asking tiresome questions based on sheer nonsense. If a doctor had to answer every one of these questions, they would simply be exhausted and have no time for anything else. In fact, the sensible course for patients and families is to let your doctors have more quiet time to study on their own and raise their level; they, far more than you laypeople, have the ability to judge and know through which channels to obtain medical knowledge truly worth absorbing.
The junk information produced by the development of the big health industry is becoming a kind of mental pollution. Among the articles shared in WeChat Moments, those about health and Buddhism have become a flood and an information public hazard. The operators of those self-media outlets have little self-discipline and are, in essence, no different from the Putian-style hospitals.
Wake up, dear readers. Polish your eyes; do not casually throw away your own life and health.