Visiting Professor — or Negative-Example Instructor?
A few days back I happened to catch on television a debate in which a handful of "experts," led by Zhang Gongyao, were attacking Chinese medicine. In the course of it, a certain visiting professor from a certain TCM university went on about the aristolochic acid in Longdan Xie Gan Wan causing kidney damage, faulting Chinese medicine for unregulated, unscientific drug use. This is in truth simple ignorance of how TCM uses its medicines.
The principle of TCM medicine use is: correct the body's leaning with the medicine's leaning. So-called toxicity, in size, is the strength of that leaning. When the body's leaning is corrected by the medicine's leaning, with disease present, the disease blocks the medicine — this is called with reason, no harm. That is, because there is a leaning of disease, the medicine carries no danger and no harm. But without disease, the person blocks the medicine — that is, when the body is not leaning, using a leaning medicine will harm the body and damage health. To use a leaning medicine without examining the patient's leaning — even using such a medicine on a healthy person for weight loss — would only be strange not to cause trouble. Longdan Xie Gan Wan is not a bad medicine; it is bad use that was at fault. To blame bad use on the toxicity of Chinese herbs has a touch of "fault sought to fit."
TCM places its weight on regulating, not on combat. The "toxicity" of Chinese medicine — that is, its leaning — is used to regulate the whole body in accord with nature, correcting the body's leaning (what we call disease). It is not the kill-toxin, kill-germ combat-style treatment of antagonism. From this very idea TCM "regulates" its medicine use. The TCM rule: with greatly toxic medicine, drive the disease down by six of ten; with normally toxic, by seven; with slightly toxic, by eight; with non-toxic, by nine — grains, meat, fruits, vegetables: feed and recover the rest. That is, with a sharply leaning medicine, regulate to six-tenths, then switch to a more mildly leaning medicine; regulate to nine-tenths or so, then drop leaning medicine altogether and use neutral or near-neutral foods to nourish recovery. How many times more refined, more scientific is this than the practice — once the disease is cured — of keeping the patient on medicine for "a stretch of consolidation"? This "regulation" is not only sound but strict, not only practical but scientific.
Every medicine has its three parts of poison. The most poisonous of Chinese medicines is arsenic — yet to treat leukemia, has not the United States too permitted its use? Set out the poisons of Western medicine and the methods of their use, and the picture is one to chill the skin and stand the hair on end: streptomycin causing deafness, tetracycline changing the teeth — and these are the small magicians; the great magicians are pain-killers that wound the kidneys, the highly toxic chemotherapy agents, and so on, often curing one channel while injuring another. Worse, some side-effects can wound the spirit.
Faced with such real "poisons," society has not raised a hue, has not been wakened. Adding the half-conscious or unconscious over-medication and over-prescription, no wonder iatrogenic and drug-induced disease has become humanity's fourth-greatest killer. TCM is the way through to a green, healthy, green medicine. Many of insight in the West have begun to see this. We, as the original land of Chinese medicine, are watching "experts" like Zhang Gongyao spring up — whose understanding of TCM is near zero. Stop crowning them as visiting professors. Set them up as negative-example instructors instead.