A Western-Medicine Exam Question That Broke Through to Me, a Former TCM Apprentice

Yesterday, while working through exercises for my major course, I came across the following multiple-choice question:

The treatment of cervical carcinoma does NOT include: A. surgical treatment, B. radiotherapy, C. chemotherapy, D. immunotherapy, E. traditional Chinese medicine treatment.

One could guess the correct answer even with one's toes; naturally it is option E, traditional Chinese medicine treatment.

As a former TCM apprentice who is now a clinical medicine (Western medicine) student, my feelings were mixed as I answered this question. This is a routine exercise that clinical medicine students encounter in medical school, and these very exercises are already permeated with distrust, discrimination, and prejudice toward TCM.

The course this question belongs to is an elective for us; the question appears in the question bank of our online learning platform. Because class hours are limited, the instructor does not teach cervical cancer; this material is left for interested students to study on their own. I have always been engaged in cancer research, so naturally I was interested in this part; I not only studied it on my own, but also did the exercises.

As I did the question, I wondered: among how many people studying clinical medicine at medical schools nationwide has this same question been set? When clinical medicine graduates who have done such questions enter the workforce, they will probably, from the marrow of their bones, fail to recognize the role of TCM in treating cervical cancer. And to how many patients and patients' families will they in turn transmit this belief?

Is TCM really so worthless? The answer is certainly no. Setting aside the fact that the traditional TCM preparation "Sanpin Yiqiang" once demonstrated formidable efficacy in treating cervical cancer, even the chemotherapeutic drugs that might be used in option C—paclitaxel and irinotecan—were purified from traditional Chinese medicines.

I am an older student in clinical medicine who brought prior skills to my apprenticeship, and I have long focused on cancer and stroke sequelae. Among the cervical cancer patients I have treated in the past, there have been cases who, after the so-called orthodox Western treatments of surgery, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy failed, with systemic metastasis and death only a step away, were treated by me personally—not by anyone else—using TCM, after which their metastatic tumors throughout the body disappeared, and they remain alive to this day without recurrence. Yet when I did this question, I still, against my conscience, chose answer E; the reason is none other than that it is the standard answer, and without choosing it one gets no points.

This deeply entrenched discrimination between Chinese and Western medicine does not seem easy to eliminate. If this discrimination cannot be eliminated, how can there be any talk of cooperation between Chinese and Western medicine? I am someone who is ruthless toward myself: having studied TCM, I was still able, approaching fifty, to take the national college entrance examination and enroll in a Western medical school to study clinical medicine; after graduation I can sit the Western medical licensing examination. Probably no Western doctor will dare to look down on someone like me, who integrates Chinese and Western medicine. But among the hundreds of thousands of licensed TCM physicians across the country, the great majority cannot, like me, set aside family life and career to also study Western medicine. For those trained in clinical medicine, the discrimination against them will not be so easily dispelled.

The reason cancer, this world-class medical problem, is a problem is precisely that it is difficult, and there is as yet no reliable solution. I still hope that in the face of medical difficulties, both Chinese and Western medicine will be a little more humble, cooperate more with each other, and have less prejudice and discrimination, seeking truth from facts—only thus can patients be benefited.