The 'Wolf Pack Tactic' in TCM Anti-Cancer Treatment
Against cancer, there is no fine reasoning to be done: you have to overwhelm the master with wild swings of the fist.
— A cancer patient in Hangzhou
I once wrote an article, My Experience Using Broad-Spectrum Anti-Cancer Chinese Herbal Compounds with Multiple Targets, describing a method I have developed over recent years that other TCM colleagues dismiss as mere "piling up herbs in disorder." I have continued to "pile up herbs" on that basis, refining the approach, and have gained a great deal; the results far exceed those of precious patent medicines such as Xihuang Wan.
I used to favor Xihuang Wan (Yellow Stone Pill), but it is expensive. Using genuine natural-musk Xihuang Wan at the doses recommended by Wang Hongxu, its Qing-dynasty creator, a single adult cancer patient would spend over 10,000 yuan a month on this one product at today's prices. Cancer courses are long, and ordinary families cannot afford that. Even at that price, Xihuang Wan's anti-cancer efficacy is not high, so I gradually abandoned it.
Ancient TCM lacked a correct understanding of cancer etiology and pathology, and the yong and ju of old classical texts could not distinguish benign from malignant. Some surviving formulas have unsatisfactory effects on malignant tumors. Genuine cancer was regarded by every great ancient TCM surgeon as almost untreatable. The four fatal diseases of TCM internal medicine and the four fatal diseases of external medicine were mostly cancers. Thus, confined to ancient texts without innovation, it is hard to develop affordable yet effective treatments for cancer.
Cancer is unlike any other disease. It is a disorder of abnormal proliferation in multicellular organisms, caused by inborn genetic defects or acquired gene mutations during cell proliferation and differentiation. Moreover, as cancer develops, malignant cells continuously evolve offspring with greater resistance to attack. So although humans have devised many treatments, we have not yet found a cure.
Will we ever find a cure and eliminate cancer? I think not. I do not believe any miracle doctor who claims to cure cancer. Our multicellular bodies have so many somatic cells that over a long human life some of those trillions of cells are bound to make copying errors; mathematically, perfect error-free replication does not exist.
We therefore cannot aim at cure; for the great majority of cancers, cure is pure fantasy. Our goal should be to control the rapid expansion of cancer cells and let patients survive as long as possible. From a cancer-biology standpoint, much about carcinogenesis remains unknown. A single mutation does not necessarily cause cancer; usually a set of genes must mutate. We may never be able to work out exactly which gene set has mutated in a given patient, and even if we did, we might be helpless against it.
A liposarcoma patient I know in Hangzhou put it well: against cancer, he said, you overwhelm the master with wild swings of the fist and don't worry about fine reasoning. Cancer biology has made fine-grained progress, yet translating that research into treatment has not yielded ideal results, because scientists often find one or a few driver mutations while remaining helpless against the other genes that jointly cause the cancer.
When we use chemotherapy and targeted drugs, the mutations we do not understand often cause patients to become resistant after a while. Cancer cells evolve more viable offspring that successfully escape the drug assault, and growth actually accelerates.
In a sense, our body is held hostage by a pack of inborn defective genes and acquired mutant genes acting together; the cancer appears. The defective and mutant genes attack our body with a wolf-pack tactic, and our counterattack should consider doing the same. Any drug with some anti-cancer effect can be used simultaneously, rather than pursuing one-on-one precision strikes—such pursuit is pedantic and wastes the moment. Precision medicine is appealing, but the wolf-pack tactic may suit cancer better.
When using the wolf-pack tactic, the key is controlling side effects, and the key to controlling side effects is controlling dosage. Our ancestors discovered this long ago: when using toxic herbs, they always started cautiously with small doses and slowly increased them if effect was unclear, while closely watching for adverse reactions. Over time they accumulated rich dosing experience that secured both efficacy and safety.
Today, of course, medicine cannot remain at the level of those rough experiences. We now have many adjuncts—for example, hepatoprotective drugs to prevent drug-induced liver injury. These methods improve patients' tolerance, allowing more types, higher doses, and more effective and safer treatment.