My View and Plan for Chinese Medicine and Pharmacy
Last November, a 10-year-old girl from a rural family in Longkou City, Shandong, fell gravely ill — cough, much phlegm, severe panting; she could not catch her breath, could not lie down; a large area around her lips and her fingernails and toenails had turned dark purple; her heart was severely affected. The Affiliated Hospital of Shandong Medical University judged her untreatable and said the only option was full lung transplant, the surgical fee alone 200,000 RMB; hospital costs would be incalculable, estimated in the hundreds of thousands or even a million. A peasant family could not raise such a sum. They then brought her to Beijing's Anzhen Hospital, where they were also told nothing could be done.
In despair, friends brought her to me. I saw the child was well developed; this did not look congenital. By the looking, asking, listening, and palpating I diagnosed it as severe disease arising from wind-cold that had transformed into heat — what looked like a severe acute pneumonia, but without fever. After diagnosis, I prescribed three doses of decoction; the symptoms eased markedly. A second prescription of three more doses brought further great reduction of cough and panting, with little phlegm; she could sleep peacefully. After third and fourth visits, the condition had greatly improved; they took the prescription back to Longkou. Not many days later the child returned to school, and her year-end exam went well; both family and child were overjoyed.
This past February they came back for follow-up. The child had grown a little, her color was good; in my judgment, her life is saved, and full recovery is to be hoped for. Because the road is long, I cannot keep regular follow-up; this is a worry.
Over the past ten-some years since retirement, old and new friends have brought their relatives and friends to me for consultation. There are one or two patients a day, mostly long-standing, hard cases. I do not open a public clinic and do not take fees. On the whole the results are passable. Six or seven extremely ill patients — old, middle-aged, young, children — sentenced to death in the hospitals — have been brought back to life by my treatment. One was 82; after cure he lived three more years and died last year in Harbin; the others are well.
By my own experience I think highly of Chinese medicine and see it has great prospects. Its theory is profound. From nearly seventy years of study, practice, and observation I can say: the ancient Chinese sages used the four diagnoses with genius — collecting signs of physiological function and disease change; observing the motions of sun, moon, stars; observing the changes of season, geography, and climate; synthesizing all this into laws applied in clinical care. Likewise with herbs — observing their growth, color, smell, taste, every form — they accumulated long experience and grasped the actions and combination-laws of herbs, applying them with skill to disease and gaining fine results. Chinese medicine and pharmacy formed in long ancient time through observation and practice. It is wholly different from Western medicine, which developed from anatomy and bio-chemical experiment — two distinct theoretical systems.
So I hold that Chinese medicine and pharmacy is a great and complex system built through long practice. Apart from the basic theory of the Huangdi Neijing, the books on the clinical side over the dynasties are many: from the Shanghan Lun and Jinkui Yaolüe down to Yizong Jinjian, the content is extremely rich. The great majority are by named physicians; even Yizong Jinjian was compiled by a small group. Because of differing experience and view, much remains, over the thousands of years, in books — but a great deal lives scattered among the folk, with its special skills. Many one-trick masters, even ones who cure with a touch, are common; most have been lost. In the past, most were individual insights, and the inheritance is not complete, full, or systematic.
For thousands of years no large-scale, comprehensive, systematic organizing-research has been carried out. So Chinese medicine has stayed on its original base and stalled.
In Chinese medicine, every dynasty has produced great physicians: Bian Que, Hua Tuo, Zhang Zhongjing, Sun Simiao, Li Shizhen, Ye Tianshi, and others. In the past century or two no such names have appeared. One may say Chinese medicine is not developing but slowly receding. The cause, in part, is that under Western cultural and scientific influence we have come to see our own long and great Chinese culture as backward and lower. I think the opposite is true. Our ancient culture, nearly 10,000 years old, was shaped by countless brilliant ancestors who synthesized the great information of Heaven, Earth, and human into a great and splendid civilization — the Heaven-Earth-Human integral culture. Chinese medicine is part of life-science. Chinese culture rests on a deep historical, objective base; on this base we have it in us to bring forth a culture-and-science that surpasses the West, building for humankind a new world of peace, health, and happiness.
Western culture-and-science, only a few centuries old, is profound but full of questions worth examination. I hold that in many places it runs against the laws of nature; pushed long enough, it endangers human survival and even risks human destruction. We should be on guard.
Chinese medicine's integral theory holds: the zang-xiang (the function of the five zang and six fu), the channels and points, are the functional system linking the body's organs to the rest of the body; the points are the pivots that regulate function. Inner causes — the seven emotions: joy, anger, sorrow, thought, grief, fear, fright — are the mental causes of disease, the inner factors. Outer causes — wind, cold, heat-of-summer, damp, dryness, fire — these six broad categories include bacteria and viruses; they are the outer factors. Qi and blood are the body's whole-body dynamic. Plus other internal and external factors. These are the theoretical base of Chinese medicine, an integral set of functional factors.
I hold that we still have a certain number of old, mid-career, and young TCM talents with academic level. They can grasp Chinese-medicine theory and the precious treatment experience. Organize them, divide the work, cooperate — through clinical practice using looking, asking, listening, palpating, collect the information of every disease (cause, signs, etc.) one by one. Analyze it into a comprehensive system; from the system analyze and draw the laws; the laws become the base for establishing principle and prescribing herbs; if outcomes match expectation, theory matches practice, subject and object accord, and the right of theory and principle-and-prescription is shown. This is what we want from the systematizing-research of TCM.
If we carry out such large-scale and systematic practical research, it is entirely possible to bring TCM's methods for every disease to a high systematic, complete, theoretical-and-practical effective level — making it a more perfect Chinese medicine. That is the first step.
The second step, on the base of the first, is to gather a high-tech force trained in this systematized Chinese medicine and, through clinical practice, design instruments that can detect the information of physiology and pathological change — to replace the practitioner's subjective looking, asking, listening, palpating — and on those objective signals prescribe and treat (or use non-drug treatment — the various external therapies). If we can reach this scientific level, TCM treatment will, I believe, bring fast and reliable recovery. Various health-keeping methods will inevitably follow. People will fall sick less, even not at all; healthy long life will follow.
I hope this preliminary plan can win support from every side, that conditions for such practice and research be provided, and that we march forward in the science of natural law for the good of humankind. With conditions in place, three years will produce results.