Future Medicine and Chinese Medicine
As humankind enters the 21st century, science and technology will move in new directions. The science of the 20th century, alongside its enormous achievements, has plundered and damaged the Earth without limit — and the troubles this brings to our descendants, and to ourselves, are plain. Medicine has its share: iatrogenic and drug-induced diseases — diseases harder to treat and more painful than what was being treated. Hence the call at the close of the 20th century to return to nature.
A forecast of what future medicine will require:
(1) Humankind will be freed from the suffering brought by chemical drugs and by invasive examination and treatment, freed from the side effects and sequelae of medicine. Medicine must speak humaneness.
In 20th-century medicine, surgical treatment reached its peak — from amputation to reattachment, kidney transplant, heart transplant, liver transplant. Technically remarkable. But if early cirrhosis could be cured at its early stage, if chronic nephritis could be cured early, if cardiovascular disease could be cured before it broke out — would that not be better? Medicine should move toward humane methods, not treat the body's organs as parts to be swapped out at will.
In speaking of humaneness, Chinese medicine has large potential. For example, in integrated Chinese-Western medicine, herbs treat acute abdominal conditions, ectopic pregnancy, gastric perforation, appendicitis, acute pancreatitis — most without surgery. With ectopic pregnancy, because surgery is avoided, the reproductive system is preserved — and the patient can have children again. How fine is that?
(2) The superior physician treats what has not yet become illness — this is Chinese medicine's principle. Future medicine will be centered on yangsheng and prevention. Drawing on Chinese medicine's millennia of results in cultivating life and preventing disease — adding qigong, martial arts, literature, fine art, music, song and dance, fine food, medicinal cuisine — the human body's health will rise to the level of a fine inner life of spirit, and disease will become rare or absent. Health gardens may be founded to teach the various methods of health-keeping; by that time the role of the hospital will fall to the lowest, and society's medical-cost outlay will fall greatly.
(3) Into the 21st century, billions in the Third World will still be unable, in the short run (in decades), to escape the suffering of poverty and disease. To secure the right to healthcare for all, medicine must be simple, proven, convenient, inexpensive — not a medical bill in astronomical figures. Simple, proven, convenient, inexpensive is precisely Chinese medicine's strength.
Chinese and Western medicine each have their strengths, and their complementarity is large. Chinese medicine's theory holds much that is ahead of the modern — therefore Chinese medicine is not only needed by modern society but will be an important part of post-modern medicine. These are my unrefined views.