Humankind Cannot Do Without Chinese Medicine
Chinese medicine and Chinese herbs are jewels of Chinese culture, a great achievement of the Chinese nation's millennia-long struggle against disease. They are not only a precious cultural heritage of the Chinese people but the cream of the cultures of the people of the world. And yet this is by no means a shared understanding among all Chinese people — even among those who practice Chinese medicine. The 21st century has come to meet us. Looking ahead, I believe: humankind cannot do without Chinese medicine.
Recently Professor Xu Jiajie of the East-West Medical Center at UCLA published, in the Proceedings of the 99 Macao International TCM Academic Conference, a paper titled "The Current State of American Medicine, Its Development, and Some Reflections." Reading the paper, I was deeply struck — and confirmed in my view that it accords with the developmental law of world medicine, and that humankind cannot do without Chinese medicine.
The United States is the cutting-edge representative of world medicine today; the direction of its development is worth our study. Prof. Xu argues that the past fifteen years have brought enormous change in medicine, a change one would not exaggerate to call a revolution. He writes: "In American society today, roughly one hundred million people suffer from chronic disease of one form or another… The body of evidence shows that the closed, hospital-based biomedical model of prevention and treatment cannot drive these illnesses' incidence and mortality down. These factors have forced American medicine to shift from a focus on acute illness, psychosomatic disease, geriatric disease, and degenerative disease, toward prevention and health-keeping. The number of hospitals is steadily declining; the inpatient-surgical model is shifting to a socialized network — home wards, home care. The main task of medicine is no longer to diagnose and treat the sick individual, but to safeguard the healthy population, to forestall disease before it arises."
This change in American medicine is exactly Chinese medicine's strength. TCM, qigong, health-preserving exercise (Taiji, Baduanjin, the Five-Animal Frolics, and the like) — these are what the American people most need by way of medical care. Master Qian Xuesen's claim that world medicine must walk the Chinese-medicine road is a sound inference.
Prof. Xu also writes: "Surging medical costs are the main cause of the reform of the American medical system. By 1996 figures, total US medical spending reached $1,035.1 billion — over 14% of GNP — and is projected to reach $2 trillion by 2007… While high spending has helped advance modern medicine's understanding of disease mechanism and capacity for diagnosis and treatment, one cannot help noting that expensive medicine has not effectively resolved many real clinical problems — especially with certain chronic diseases and diseases of the aged, where it remains helpless." He further notes: "The rising cost is putting unbearable pressure on the public, the national economy, and the medical-insurance and care systems; over forty million people have no medical insurance." For the uninsured American, illness means paying out of pocket — and that is no small matter.
Prof. Xu's paper is a portrait of the medical landscape of the world's most advanced country. It reflects how a great economic power cannot carry its own enormous medical bill — and gives one serious pause. Where does American medicine go from here? Prof. Xu says: "Because modern medicine lacks effective, simple, economical methods for many chronic and difficult conditions, and because some Western drugs carry many side effects, many patients, seeking relief at safety and cost, turn elsewhere… Now 35 American states and the District of Columbia have approved acupuncture; over one million patients receive acupuncture treatments each year, with treatment-visits reaching ten million; more than ten thousand practitioners now perform acupuncture, with about three thousand of these being Western-trained MDs; the schools teaching acupuncture and Eastern medicine as primary subjects number 55. National herbal-product sales in 1998 reached roughly $3.5 billion. The number of massage sessions per year approaches 75 million. Taiji and qigong are growing ever more loved by Americans as exercise for health and disease prevention."
Prof. Xu, a well-known physician in America, has his own seasoned understanding of Chinese medicine and has studied it diligently. In 1992 he invited me to UCLA Medical Center to jointly consult on difficult cases and apply TCM treatment — the results were definite, and confirmed his confidence in integrating Chinese and Western medicine. With those facts he persuaded his superiors and colleagues, and afterwards the East-West Medical Center was founded. The center's case volume leads the hospital. Because Prof. Xu is of Chinese descent, the center is not named Chinese-and-Western medicine, but East-West Medicine — a matter of united-front strategy too. The center carries out from clinical care to prevention and rehabilitation; its integrative-medicine practice has successfully solved many difficult cases and chronic conditions that defied Western medicine, with strong social and economic results. From 1994 the school began short-form pilot teaching for fourth-year and first-year medical students; with this training, most students have been able to apply both Chinese and Western thinking to a case, propose a treatment plan, and execute simple Chinese-medicine procedures. The students welcomed it. Prof. Xu proposed and funded a scholarship in my name — $500 a year — which has been awarded at our university for seven years. His commitment to developing Chinese medicine speaks for itself.
From this one can see: American medicine and its system, called the most advanced in the world today, do not look ideal when measured by social benefit; and measured by cost, even the world's richest country cannot bear them. So can the Third World walk this road? The world's population stands at six billion; America's is only two-hundred-some million. By the American model, who is to safeguard humankind's health? In the 21st century, in how many places, for how many people, will the right to medical care truly be enjoyed? I hold that we must vigorously develop and promote Chinese medicine — bringing the simple, convenient, inexpensive, and proven medicine of TCM to all humankind. This is our duty.
Excerpted from New Chinese Medicine, 2000 No. 2