Chinese Medicine to the Front — Defeat SARS
— Memorandum of the Mid-Career TCM Specialists' Roundtable, Beijing Cui Yueli Center for Traditional Medicine
On May 12, the Beijing Cui Yueli Center for Traditional Medicine convened a roundtable of mid-career TCM specialists. All agreed that the May 8 roundtable of senior TCM physicians held by Comrade Wu Yi — which highly affirmed Chinese medicine and reiterated the equal-weight policy for Chinese and Western medicine — was a rare encouragement and spur for Chinese medicine in recent years. Spirits ran high; we had long hoped, as TCM practitioners, to join the fight against SARS. The lively, deep discussion produced this memorandum.
▲ Drawing on ancient, near, and present facts, on TCM theory and on their own clinical experience, the specialists fully argued that SARS can be treated. That the authorities cannot treat it does not mean Chinese medicine cannot. TCM has ample confidence in treating SARS. Western medicine begins by finding the pathogen and then kills it. TCM changes the line of attack: starting from changing conditions, it removes from the body the conditions on which the virus survives and multiplies — observing pulse and pattern, knowing the offense, and treating according to pattern, prescribing for each person and each disease. Faced with a pathogen hard to identify and unpredictably mutating, the TCM approach plainly has a marked advantage.
▲ For TCM to treat SARS, it must be at the front. Talking strategy from the chair, far from the patient, drawing up clinical contingency plans and reference formulas — that is scratching an itch through a boot. TCM treatment cannot do without face-to-face looking, listening, asking, and palpating; still less without the active living rule of the individual case. Different physicians, faced with different patients, different disease courses, different transmissions, will of course feel differently, prescribe differently — that is TCM's living soul. To impose regulation and standardization here is to misunderstand TCM, and indeed to strangle it.
▲ TCM treating SARS must be allowed to lead. In recent years TCM as auxiliary has become the rule, Chinese-Western integration the model — TCM has lost the power and the chance to treat on its own, and is steadily losing its character and dying out. This time, facing a fierce disease that admits no error or hesitation, TCM must be given a free hand to show its full power. Chinese and Western medicines' principles, methods, and treatment rules are entirely different. To the TCM eye, the Western use of antibiotics and hormones often drives the evil inward; TCM must then abandon the disease to treat the drug — first correct the drug-induced error before saving the patient. This not only raises the difficulty of treatment, but, given the rapid course and transmutation of the disease, loses the moment for cure and puts the patient in a corner.
▲ For TCM at the front, legal protection is needed. That TCM can treat the dangerous, the grave, and the urgent is shown by countless facts ancient and recent. But in recent years TCM has been receding — chiefly because of the lack of legal protection. Medical regulations follow Western medicine; when something happens with TCM, a hundred mouths cannot speak. If TCM is to be at the front this time, legal protection must be strong, even over-correcting toward equality. We propose that if a patient is to be treated by TCM for SARS, it must be his free choice, signed and acknowledged, and ideally also signed by family. We further propose that this extraordinary period be taken as the occasion to amend related regulations, creating conditions for TCM to return to the ranks treating the dangerous, grave, and urgent — giving the public another medical option and another layer of health protection.
▲ Surveyed across Beijing, the TCM ranks hide dragons and crouching tigers; there is still real strength — in hospitals, schools, and clinics there are practitioners of genuine level — but very scattered. To allot places by administrative quota or by recommendation alone risks mismatch of name and substance, mixing fish with dragons, forming cliques, missing the many for the one. Better that the SARS-leadership group, or an authoritative body it commissions, openly recruit and reorganize. The decision to risk one's life at the front is not lightly made; volunteers will be those with courage and capability — the proper way to pan gold from sand. This both avoids the narrowness of factional gates and breaks the chains pressing talent down.
▲ The specialists hold that the Center's resolute, strict, decisive quarantine measures are highly effective prevention. But the current isolation suits and disinfection protections may not be effective: infectious-disease hospitals are not short of standard dress and disinfection, yet large numbers of medical staff still fall ill — proof enough. To avoid bathroom trips medical staff drink less; to reduce front-line numbers they keep all-night shifts — both bring on internal fire, easy for the virus to exploit. Wards cannot open windows, so virus concentration in the limited space surges, and the right qi of the medical staff can hardly hold off the evil. Where TCM enters the front, beyond necessary isolation, its choice of protection should be respected. Distilling traditional TCM protection methods will help raise the overall standard of protection.
For TCM to go forth and defeat SARS is a great review of the present TCM ranks, and a fine moment to bring forth anew the li-fa-fang-yao (principle, method, formula, drug) of traditional TCM. On this base, by reflecting on policy in TCM clinical, education, research, and pharmacy — and overcoming the inner resistance within the TCM field — a new great unity in the TCM ranks may take shape.
Unite, and revive Chinese medicine!
Beijing Cui Yueli Center for Traditional Medicine
May 13, 2003