Some Views on the Dispute Between Chinese and Western Medicine

I rarely involve myself in the dispute between Chinese and Western medicine, because that dispute, like disputes of faith, is unlikely through all the arguing to produce any result that changes either side's position. In other words, after all the back-and-forth, one finds one has been talking a lot of nonsense.

I study both Chinese and Western medicine myself, and have several teachers of each. My Chinese-medicine teacher is a certain old physician who holds the title of "Hubei Province Famous Veteran Chinese Physician" (to avoid unnecessary trouble, I will not name my hometown Chinese-medicine master). He is well known in Hubei; I signed a formal apprenticeship contract with him, notarized by a notary office, and follow him into clinic whenever I can. This is the path my master laid for me to take the licensed-physician exam; he hopes I will be qualified to practice lawfully. My master appreciated my attitude toward studying medicine and wished to help me become a good, lawful physician. China's Ministry of Health allows apprenticeship-trained students to sit the licensed-physician exam, and my master, caring for me, provided these conditions. Of course, I have more than this one Chinese-medicine teacher; another time I will write about my masters.

My Western-medicine teachers include Professor Li Zhonghui, formerly of the Occupational Disease Research Institute of Beijing Chaoyang Hospital, and Professor Huang Xizhen, formerly a respiratory specialist at Peking Union Medical College Hospital, as well as some senior schoolmates of mine. Professor Huang was a doctoral supervisor; moved by my sincere devotion to studying medicine, every time I went to her to prescribe for my teacher's wife, she patiently answered my questions and guided my medical study. I am deeply grateful to this elderly physician; her medical skill was outstanding and her medical ethics noble. Although after two years of treatment and great effort Professor Huang could not ultimately cure my teacher's wife's asthma, my teacher's family and I remain grateful for two years of her careful treatment and for her teaching me clinical medicine. Her treatment at least relieved my teacher's wife's suffering for a time and let her live at a higher quality for a while.

Once I went to Peking Union Medical College Hospital to see Professor Huang; she had many outpatients, so I went to Wangfujing Bookstore to look up materials. I got so absorbed that I forgot the time I had set with her and missed the appointment by over an hour. Hurrying back to the Union Hospital, I found the white-haired Professor Huang still waiting for me. One of her doctoral students angrily scolded me, saying Professor Huang was over eighty and should long have gone home; because I had stood her up, she had eaten no lunch and was waiting there hungry. I explained the cause in great confusion, but Professor Huang kept smiling kindly and stopped her student from dressing me down. She patiently examined my teacher's wife, answered the medical questions I raised, and resolved my doubts point by point. Over two years, every time Professor Huang was so careful and patient that I benefited greatly and progressed a lot in medicine.

As for Professor Huang Xizhen's influence in the medical world, one can probably look it up with a Baidu search. A Western-medicine expert who can be called a founder in several medical fields in China is certainly no ordinary person.

Professor Li Zhonghui is the elderly physician who once taught me Western medicine in earnest; she was also a lymphoma patient of mine. Before retirement she was a detoxification expert leading for the Ministry of Health, frequently traveling around the country to detoxify patients poisoned in special occupations. But the people she detoxified most were cancer patients injured by chemotherapy. She deeply sympathized with the plight of patients poisoned by chemotherapy. She fought her whole life against drug poisoning and chemical poisoning. In her early seventies she developed lymphoma. Her husband had previously died of lung cancer after several months of chemotherapy. Professor Li, a graduate of the old Peking University Medical School who had worked her whole life in medicine and become an experienced, highly skilled generalist in old age, resolutely abandoned chemotherapy after developing late-stage lymphoma and took the path of pure Chinese-medicine treatment. When I previously wrote about her condition I always withheld her real name, fearing she would be disturbed. In fact that worry was rather superfluous; it was I, shaken by medical events, who needed her to help me regain my emotional balance.

Both of these Western-medicine teachers told me not to despise Chinese medicine and not to ignore the severe side effects of Western medicine. Of course, they did not reject Western medicine. These two medical professors spent their whole careers treating patients with Western drugs, yet Professor Huang fairly told me that my teacher's wife had actually worsened the further Western treatment went—it was Western hormone therapy that destroyed her immunity.

Professor Li Zhonghui needless to say gave herself over to Chinese medicine. When she asked me to treat her malignant lymphoma, I was anxious and told her my skill was uneven, that it was tantamount to doing a human experiment on a patient. She told me in all earnestness that in her whole medical career every treatment was a human experiment on a patient; the profession of doctor is precisely the trade of doing human experiments on patients, and if I dared not do human experiments on patients I should not study medicine. Later, when the treatment I gave her worked well, I finally set my mind at ease. The reason she dared to seek treatment from a fledgling little Chinese physician like me was that she saw my love of medicine exceeded that of most highly educated medical professionals, and the Chinese-medicine knowledge I explained to her convinced her.

Later I read the thick Western-medicine textbook Shiyong Neixue (Practical Internal Medicine). This large sixteen-character work, in two volumes, is as thick as two big bricks. There I saw that many concepts in modern medicine are labeled "hypotheses"—meaning that even now, the medical establishment's account of the causes of many diseases is still an experience-based guess, not fully proven, and cannot be named a principle. Just as Professor Li Zhonghui said, clinicians do human experiments on patients, using these experiments to verify or falsify medical hypotheses.

The richer the clinical experience and observation of a physician, the less biased he is toward either Chinese or Western medicine. Academician Zhong Nanshan is one example. As a Western-medicine authority on respiratory disease, Zhong greatly esteems Chinese medicine and has several times stepped forward to say that Chinese medicine's concepts are advanced. After SARS, few paid attention to the SARS patients who were rescued; in fact, because of the large amounts of Tamiflu and similar drugs used during the SARS period, they were left with severe sequelae and a life worse than death. Quite a number of these SARS-sequela patients were themselves hospital doctors before falling ill.

Another academician in the medical world, Academician Shen Zuyin, was a Western-medicine expert before studying Chinese medicine; he later studied under the famous Chinese medical scholar Professor Jiang Chunhua and, because his mastery of both Chinese and Western medicine was outstanding, was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. After studying and clinically applying Chinese medicine, Academician Shen became a firm supporter of it. The famous Japanese physician Tsumura Junshin (Tangben Qiuzhen) was originally also a Western doctor; after his own daughter died of typhoid fever despite Western treatment's failure, he began to study Chinese medicine and ultimately spent his whole life defending it.

Now many people parrot others in denying Chinese medicine. This arrogance and prejudice, born of ignorance, shallowness, and hubris, is precisely the kind of faith-based bias that is extremely hard to change; I generally am unwilling to argue with such prejudice.

An ancient famous physician in China said: patients do not fear having few diseases but many; physicians do not fear having many methods but few. Another ancient famous physician said: if the zang-fu organs could speak, the physician's face would turn the color of earth. In fact, neither Chinese nor Western medicine has any right to be arrogant. To this day, the level of human medicine is still quite immature; many medical theories are only hypotheses, and neither Chinese nor Western medicine is exempt. A physician who truly cherishes his patients' lives will not irresponsibly grow conceited, belittle other arts of healing to court attention, elevate himself, and mislead the public.

I often urge the patients I meet not to get drawn into the Chinese-Western medical dispute. As a patient, survival comes first. Whichever treatment works, choose it; if you hold preconceived prejudices, you will miss many chances to survive. The famous Zhejiang Chinese physician Professor He Ren spent his whole life treating his own cancer with integrated Chinese-Western medicine, led by Chinese medicine; he successfully fought cancer for decades and lived to ninety-two. Ninety-two is a great age even among the general population—not to mention for someone who had cancer for decades. How many cancer patients can compare with Professor He Ren, himself a Chinese-medicine professor and a fellow cancer patient?

Both Chinese and Western medicine have shortcomings, and crucially, many of their concepts are still unproven hypotheses that may be overturned by later generations; many earlier medical hypotheses have been overturned one after another in recent decades. We have reason to believe that as medicine develops, physicians will find more and more medical hypotheses to be wrong. If a person is conceited and arrogantly believes the little theoretical knowledge he has learned is absolutely correct, it shows his mind has not matured.

Another well-known elderly physician in our country once said: a physician under sixty should not rashly claim he understands medicine. I deeply sympathize with these words, because as my own experience in the medical field has grown, I have continually discovered that the medical views I once held were wrong. So I have become more and more cautious. A wrong medical view is not like an ordinary wrong view; a wrong medical view often causes avoidable death and injury, and spreading a wrong medical view may mislead other patients and cost them their chance to survive.

Over the years, many patients I have treated have failed treatment at various of China's top famous physicians. Because I have met too many such patients, my view of so-called famous physicians has become increasingly sober and calm.

Disease is a puzzle requiring endless human exploration. On this road, let us be more modest, broader-minded, less prejudiced, and more practice-oriented.