Is It the Toxin Curing Disease, or the Specific Immune System It Awakens?

Several years ago, a radiologist from Jiangsu Province came to see me. She had unfortunately developed advanced colorectal cancer; after suffering through painful surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy, her condition was still not contained, and she hoped for TCM help.

Before coming to me, she had herself, for a long time, tried treating cancer with medicinal liquors steeped in various poisons. She did so because her own maternal uncle, after developing mid-to-late-stage lung cancer, refused all treatment and treated himself with medicinal liquor, achieving a cure. At first her uncle used geckos steeped in liquor; later he added venomous snakes; later still he added toads; in the end the poisons he steeped in liquor numbered several dozen. Her uncle thus drank a few cups of his own poison-steeped liquor with each meal, and in the end his cancer was cured.

She was unlucky. She copied her uncle's method exactly, but it had no effect at all, and her cancer progressed rapidly. Her colleagues told her that perhaps her uncle had been misdiagnosed, but she refused to believe it, because she herself had examined her uncle many times; her uncle's biopsy pathology had been done by an acquaintance of hers, and the pathology was repeated in three different hospitals, all confirming that her uncle indeed had cancer. So she could not accept the idea that her uncle had been misdiagnosed; she believed her uncle had truly been cured by those poisons steeped in liquor.

This was an unfortunate patient, and my treatment of her also ended in failure. She later tried many other methods, all to no avail, and finally passed away at the end of 2018. Before she died, she repeatedly urged me to study the anti-cancer mechanism of her uncle's medicinal liquor.

In the past I might have simply said this was "fighting poison with poison." But as I read more and more literature, I began to realize the complexity of the mechanism of this treatment.

There was a famous American toxin scientist named Bill Haast who, starting in 1948, kept injecting himself with trace amounts of cobra venom; later he tried injecting various other snake venoms, and finally he even injected himself at one go with a mixture of dozens of toxins. Bill Haast was not mad; he was conducting human experiments on his own body. Other scientists keep injecting snake venom into horses to produce antibodies that effectively resist it, and then refine antivenom from the horse's blood to treat humans bitten by snakes. But because these antivenoms come from horses, they inevitably contain many foreign proteins that easily trigger allergies in humans. Bill Haast hoped to use, on his own body, the method used to make antivenom in horses. He succeeded; his own serum had anti-snake-venom effects.

When someone locally was bitten by a snake and no suitable antivenom was available, Bill Haast would donate his own blood to the bitten person; his good deeds saved many lives. Bill Haast later came to be regarded as one of the pioneers of self-immunization. Now, around the world, many people are trying this self-immunization approach; most of them are keepers of venomous reptiles, who, whether out of professional need or personal hobby, raise various venomous snakes or lizards. They too adopt Bill Haast's method, constantly injecting themselves with toxins to raise their immunity.

So far this self-immunization practice remains highly controversial, but the scientific community has begun studying the phenomenon. Bill Haast was bitten by venomous snakes more than 170 times in his life; though several times his life hung in the balance, he always recovered. Moreover, at the age of 88, Bill Haast declared that, benefiting from this self-immunization experiment, he was in excellent health, his immunity far stronger than ordinary people's, so he believed he would live past 100—and in the end his words came true.

The health of some other self-immunizers (SIers) is also enviable; they rarely catch colds, and in flu season their immunity is enough to resist influenza viruses. But this dangerous experiment has also taught many people bitter lessons; some have faced life-threatening danger while trying self-immunization. So until now most scientists do not endorse this attempt.

Chinese people are all too familiar with this self-immunization behavior. I believe most Chinese have encountered or heard of medicinal liquor; many middle-aged and elderly Chinese steep various medicinal liquors at home. Among the medicinals they use there is no lack of poisons like venomous snakes, centipedes, and scorpions, the most common being venomous snakes. The most common use of these liquors is treating rheumatism—a disease that modern medicine classifies as an immune disease; the reason people develop rheumatism is a problem with the immune system.

If we look at Bill Haast's self-immunization experiment, it is not hard to see that the traditional use of medicinal liquor to treat rheumatism is a scientific method, and that drinking the liquor is far safer than injecting snake venom. The mechanism by which medicinal liquor cures disease may not be "fighting poison with poison" either, but rather raising one's own immunity through constant contact with poisons. In the end, what cures our rheumatism may not be those venomous snakes, but our own steadily strengthened specific immune system.

Another toxin widely used to treat rheumatism is bee venom. Around the world, people use apitherapy to treat rheumatism: some inject bee venom, some directly let bees sting them with their stingers, and some use bee products such as honey and propolis. This treatment also has some effect—if it were entirely ineffective, so many people would not follow suit.

Many people explain bee-venom treatment of rheumatism as fighting poison with poison. In fact, bee venom is basically harmless. The main component of honeybee venom is a compound called melittin; melittin captures the molecules that make up cell membranes and selectively cuts them into signaling compounds, thereby triggering the human immune system to respond.

So after being stung by a bee, the reason one feels so awful is simply an allergic reaction of the human immune system—what everyone commonly calls "allergy."

Medicine defines allergy as an "exaggerated response," and the substance causing the allergic reaction is called an "allergen"—anything that can trigger immune pathways and stimulate antibody production may become an allergen. When the human body is allergic, it is not because the allergen's toxin is especially poisonous (just think: the most common allergen is peanuts), but because these allergens stimulate the body to produce IgE (immunoglobulin E) antibodies rather than the more common IgG (immunoglobulin G) antibodies. IgE antibodies cause the body to release large amounts of histamine and other inflammatory compounds, triggering a systemic allergic reaction that can, in mild cases, lower blood pressure and, in severe cases, trigger cardiac arrest.

Immunologists still do not understand why, in the course of human evolution, the immune system came to contain IgE antibodies, which seem to do more harm than good. In fact, this antibody is rare, making up no more than 0.001% of all antibodies. But another study confirmed that people with an allergic constitution have a lower rate of cancer.

In 1991, a scientist named Margie Profet first proposed the toxin hypothesis. She argued that allergy is not a side effect of some other process; the existence of allergy has its own meaning. From an evolutionary standpoint, allergy does indeed cost our bodies, but since the body has retained this mechanism, the adaptive evolution must do more good than harm. She argues that toxins in nature are ubiquitous, and most toxins cause both immediate and long-term effects; some toxins (such as aflatoxin) stimulate mutation and cause cancer. Allergic reactions protect us humans from these invisible toxins; common allergic responses such as vomiting, coughing, and sneezing all help the body expel toxins, and lowered blood pressure also slows the spread of toxins through the body. So Margie Profet argues that allergy is the specific immune system's last line of defense against toxins (including poisons), the immune system's last-ditch battle against harmful substances.

In 1993, Margie Profet received a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" for this hypothesis. In 2013, scientists found in experiments that small doses of bee venom and the allergic pathway it triggers protect mice against subsequently injected lethal doses of toxin. Scientists then tried the more toxic Russell's viper venom and found that, just as with bee venom, the pre-triggered IgE likewise protected mice against subsequently injected lethal doses of toxin. Margie Profet's hypothesis was confirmed.

In Jin Yong's wuxia novels, there are often characters immune to all poisons—the leader of the Five Poisons Sect, for instance. These people deal with all kinds of poisons long-term, and after drinking liquor steeped in poisons they become immune to other poisons. Though this is a novelist's tale, it actually has a scientific basis.

Of course, in my own clinical experience, the effects of poisons on the human body are very complex. Some poisons can indeed directly kill cancer cells, such as arsenic; some act by stimulating the human immune system, such as bee venom; still others neither treat disease nor stimulate the immune system but directly cause death, such as some deadly jellyfish toxins and certain snake venoms. And the mechanisms by which lethal poisons kill also differ. The most lethal component of box jellyfish venom, for example, is a porin that punches holes in cells, causing potassium leakage; under its destruction, blood potassium levels rise sharply, triggering cardiovascular failure within minutes. Snake venom kills mainly because its metalloprotease causes fatal bleeding problems—and long-term use of antihypertensive drugs made from snake venom has the side effect of causing internal bleeding.

So the mechanisms by which poisons heal and by which they kill are both very complex, and the TCM treatment of "fighting poison with poison" is very complex too. Only when basic science reaches a certain level of development can we more clearly understand the mechanisms behind some of our ancestors' survival and healing experiences. Personally, I believe that we who study medicine—whether TCM or Western—must keep pace with the times, read more basic-science literature, and raise our overall level.

I have one more modest opinion: TCM should avoid clashing with mainstream medicine as much as possible. We can, in the position of alternative medicine (whether or not the TCM establishment admits it, the fact that practicing TCM physicians number less than one-tenth of Western physicians already places TCM in the position of alternative medicine), quietly update TCM's theoretical system by integrating modern scientific knowledge. I believe that, in a few hundred years, TCM combined with modern science will be transformed, becoming more effective and more precise than traditional TCM.