Why Some Cancer Survivors Can Live a Very Long Time With Their Tumours
In recent years, medical research on tumours has grown ever deeper, and cancer patients are living ever longer. Oncologists at home and abroad are constantly updating their understanding of tumours. Some scholars hold that after a tumour forms, the intercellular regulation and signalling are disrupted rather than lost. If treatment can restore the responsiveness of the body, then the growth rate of the cancer will slow or even stagnate. If so, then even though the patient still has tumour and cancer cells in the body, he can survive with cancer. Effective cancer treatment need not aim at complete disappearance of the tumour.
But for patients and their families, the mere existence of a tumour always weighs heavily on the heart; they insist on using every method to get rid of it. The result is not that the tumour is eliminated, but that the patient's immunity is damaged, and in the end the cancer progresses rapidly and survival is greatly shortened. Thus some patients, if left untreated, might have lived for a while; after aggressive treatment, their bodies rapidly collapse within months and they die in suffering, ending with nothing left - neither person nor money.
The treatment strategy of surviving with cancer does not aim to kill cancer cells; rather, it regards the development and treatment of the tumour as a host-centred dynamic process, striving to adjust the patient into a state in which the tumour grows slowly. This idea coincides with TCM's treatment ideas of "nourish upright qi and the accumulation vanishes of itself" and "stop once reduced by more than half."
We often see patients whose tumour rapidly recurs and grows large again within a year after surgery and chemoradiotherapy, so severe that further surgery and chemoradiotherapy are needed. For such patients, if there were an alternative strategy that slowed - even stagnated or shrank - the growth of the tumour, that alternative might be more meaningful than surgery and chemoradiotherapy.
Sometimes, after recurrence and metastasis, patients try regimens that modern medicine regards as irregular. Such regimens are often roundly rejected by doctors or family members deeply influenced by modern scientific thinking, yet the patient survives miraculously. Medicine itself is imperfect, and every individual body differs; therefore some personalized treatments are not necessarily wrong.
Over these years, I myself have controlled the condition of some patients with highly malignant tumours using TCM, extending from the few months that modern medicine gave them into several years; they are still alive today. The cancer cells in these patients have not necessarily been killed; some tumours are still present, merely shrunk or stopped growing. When the patients undergo Western check-ups, indicators still occasionally run high. But whenever that happens, after a period of Chinese medicine the ascites and elevated cancer markers are resolved; after a while, the problem may recur again. Fortunately, some patients have grown used to this state of coexisting with cancer, and are thoroughly disillusioned with surgery and chemoradiotherapy; they just muddle along, and in fact get through safely.
What I find regrettable is that most patients only try TCM after repeatedly failing at Western surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy; and some, when they do turn to TCM, cannot persist year after year. So most patients who seek TCM are either already at too late a stage with a poor prognosis, or lack confidence in TCM-style treatment and ultimately choose to return to the all-out fight against cancer - ending in incurable collapse.
Adjusting a patient's mindset to a state of coexisting with cancer is truly very hard.