TCM Chat ⁽⁹⁶⁾

Recently, because of falling temperatures and the spread of influenza A (H1N1), many people have caught colds. Frail and elderly cancer patients should take precautions during this flu season and avoid crowded places. Many cancer patients do not die of cancer but of influenza. One…

There may be shortcuts to many things in this world, but when it comes to studying medicine there are none. Over the years I have taken many detours in my medical studies, and in retrospect I somewhat regret it, because I wasted a lot of…

As a traditional medicine, much of TCM theory is wrong, yet TCM genuinely works when treating disease. This shows that there are many practical elements within traditional Chinese medicine, but these practical elements have been misinterpreted because of the limitations of the times. Medicine advances…

The late great Shanghan expert Professor Li Peisheng held that a TCM scholar must be both a bookman and a physician. As a bookman, one must read widely, write much, be able to go from breadth to essentials, and digest what one reads; as a…

The veteran TCM physician Yin Huihe came from a medical family. His father Yin Bingzhong was a famous doctor in Jingjiang, Jiangsu, and a third-generation disciple of Fei Boxiong, founder of the Menghe school of the Jiangnan region. Yin Huihe studied medicine with his father…

I often advise families of end-stage cancer patients to give up illusions, care more for the patient, and stop useless treatments; but many cannot accept this emotionally. A saying widely circulated in medicine is: sometimes doing nothing is better for the patient than doing something.

Recently, the father of a neuroblastoma child asked me: he had seen the other children being treated alongside his own at a certain hospital undergo explosive relapse and death, which frightened him. He asked me how the probability of such relapse and death could be…

Many cancer patients only seek Chinese medicine at the very last moment. In fact, when a cancer patient has truly exhausted all the methods of Western medicine and only then turns to Chinese medicine, Chinese medicine will no longer have a good effect either. Especially…

Academician Wang Yongyan issued a call to the TCM community to "read the classics and do clinical practice," arguing that to cultivate outstanding TCM talent one must value "reading the classics and doing clinical practice." This is, admittedly, very sound advice. But times have changed.

On July 13, the Zhejiang Provincial Food and Drug Administration issued Drug Quality Announcement No. 4 of 2019, reporting that 51 batches of drugs had failed sampling. According to the announcement, more than 80% of the substandard drugs were Chinese materia medica; both Chinese herbal…