My Medical Theory ⁽¹⁸⁴⁾

The reason refractory diseases are hard to treat is that their causes and pathology are intricate; they cannot be grasped by simple thinking or treated by simple methods. Unfortunately, human medicine today still largely operates with simple-minded approaches to disease. That is why, when treating…

The basic theory of TCM has existed for more than two thousand years; in historical development it has been continuously improved and updated, gradually growing into a vast theoretical system. This theoretical system contains both the essential and the dross. Limited by historical conditions, the…

On Saturday, a gastroenterologist came to see me about her child's illness. She was trained in Western medicine; I used to study TCM and am now also studying Western medicine, though only just beginning. We chatted for a while about medical matters. She had taken…

In recent years, colleagues in Chinese medicine have often discussed with me how to improve clinical efficacy. Based on my own experience, my answer is: read medical cases (yi'an) extensively. From ancient times to the present, many physicians have left behind precious medical cases, which…

On July 2, 2025, the Cixi Health Bureau's official account posted an article titled "The Gaokao Is Over; It Is Time to Persuade People to Study Medicine," and this post went viral online. The article read: Sorry, medical students, one medical textbook after another vows…

There is a folk saying: nine out of ten stomachs are diseased. Stomach disease is an extremely common condition; almost everyone encounters it at some stage of life. The "stomach disease" of folk saying actually also includes what modern medicine calls esophageal diseases and intestinal…

I often talk with people about the causes of disease, and more often than not they end up attributing whatever illness they have to emotional factors, as if the patient would not have got the disease if only their mood had been better. This way…

Chronic diseases such as COPD, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and psychiatric disorders are, in essence, basically incurable. This means that among patients with these diseases, only a few fully recover; the great majority of chronic patients must live with their disease for a…

Can TCM prescriptions be written like solving a math problem, grouping similar formulas and herbs together like combining like terms? The answer is yes. From ancient times to the present, many great clinical TCM physicians have done exactly this; they simply call it by different…

Different doses of a drug produce different clinical effects; this is an undeniable fact in modern pharmacological research. The dose-response problem exists not only for Western drugs but also for Chinese herbal medicine. Many TCM physicians, when troubled by clinical efficacy, blame the herbs themselves.