My Medical Theory ⁽¹⁸⁴⁾

Everyone except God must speak with data. —Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer After more than ten years of treating cancer according to traditional TCM pattern differentiation, I am deeply disappointed in the efficacy rate of relying on TCM observation,…

On the day of the End of Heat (Chushu), I shouldered a hoe and went to my little vegetable plot to turn the soil. I dug about thirty square meters, worked up a heavy sweat, and rubbed the skin off my hands. After digging, I…

Not long ago, the family of a terminal ovarian cancer patient, recommended by her classmate—another physician—came to me, asking me to help her mother relieve suffering. This patient developed intestinal obstruction with every chemotherapy cycle; her condition was already very serious, and the possibility of…

Patients or their family members often try every possible means to solve a single problem—Chinese medicine, Western medicine, health supplements, folk remedies—and the result is counterproductive. The patient’s problem is not solved, but instead a variety of serious side effects are brought about: diarrhea, hematochezia,…

Once a junior fellow apprentice of mine contacted me, saying he had insomnia because of work pressure. I asked him how he was having insomnia, and he said that after waking at five in the morning he could not get back to sleep, whereas he…

I am not good at pulse diagnosis. Beyond the classic floating/sinking/slow/rapid, I am unsure whether my readings are right, and even my interpretation of those is shaky. This may shock many, who cannot believe someone like me has such weak pulse skills. Professor Jiang Chunhua…

The British anthropologist Nigel Barley wrote a book titled The Innocent Anthropologist, which mainly recounts the author's two periods of fieldwork among the Dowayo people of Cameroon in Africa. In this book, Nigel Barley tells a joke. He says that when he was about to…

The average lifespan of the Peking Man (“Beijing apeman”) of Zhoukoudian was only about 15 years. After more than 500,000 years of evolution, the human life expectancy has now reached the seventies or eighties. In some long-lived countries and regions it is even higher; for…

Humans have not conquered cancer, yet the literature on it already fills warehouses. Merely reading it all is impossible; no one could finish in a lifetime. And by the time we finish the existing literature, new research may have overturned the earlier conclusions. Oncology experts…

Serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine) is an indole derivative, abbreviated 5-HT, with the chemical formula C10H12N2O, and is converted from tryptophan. It was first discovered in blood serum, hence the name serum tonin. Serotonin is widely present in mammalian tissues and is highly concentrated in the cerebral cortex…