In Decades, We Have Not Raised a Real Chinese Doctor
To see that a generation as young as yours cares about Chinese medicine makes us very glad. If your generation can see this problem and begin to take it up, then Chinese medicine has hope. We are now in a meeting to confirm the chief-editor selections for higher-TCM teaching-material reform. At this morning's meeting, we senior Chinese-medicine practitioners put the problem to them in the rawest terms: why is General Secretary Jiang Zemin's address of March 4 not reflected in this meeting?
What sort of Chinese doctor should the 21st century train? What teaching materials should the 20th century learn from? We senior TCM practitioners hold that the spirit of General Secretary Jiang's March 4 address must be carried through, must be carried into the writing of the lecture-notes and into the writing of the textbooks. At this morning's meeting, some still spoke the line, "Achievements are the main story; though there are problems of this and that kind, they can be overcome." With this view we have grave disagreement. Because on the afternoon of May 30, a senior leader came to our hospital to see Elder Jiao (Mr. Jiao Shude) for his birthday; we were also invited along with a few other senior TCM practitioners to talk over the affairs of Chinese medicine — besides us, Elder Ren (Mr. Ren Jixue), Wang Yongyan, and others. At that meeting we basically reached this consensus: let us no longer say that achievements are the main story, that the problems can be overcome and be done with. That phrase should not be said any longer. One can say: in decades, we have not raised a real Chinese doctor — what achievement remains to speak of? When the TCM universities have not raised Chinese doctors, what is the point of saying achievements are the main story? Everyone agreed: in decades we have not raised doctors who can see patients with Chinese-medicine thought and method. So if TCM education is not now subject to a sweeping reform, then in another few decades the doctors who can treat patients in the traditional way of the senior generation will be gone. Are there still TCM physicians? There are still those who hang out the TCM sign. But it will be as a certain newspaper said: "Doctors who use Chinese herbs are not few — but a doctor who uses Chinese herbs is not the same as a Chinese-medicine doctor." Western doctors also use Chinese herbs — they use a herb the way they use a drug, this herb treats this disease — but Chinese medicine is not that.
We senior TCM practitioners hold that General Secretary Jiang's March 4 address was a critique-by-absence-of-critique of TCM work. Although the word critique was not openly said, in fact it was a critique. The General Secretary spoke of "rightly handling the relation between inheritance and development." Since rightly handle was said, it means that the past was not right. If the past had been right, why add the word rightly?
Today, when students of TCM colleges graduate, they enter the same frame as Western-medicine colleges: they must first serve as resident physicians; in five years they may rise to attending physician. At the time of rising, there is an examination; selections are made; and Western medicine occupies a great share of the examination content. To prepare for that five-year-later exam, the student attacks Western medicine the moment he graduates. In school the TCM he learned was not that much; once in the hospital, for five years he hammers at Western medicine; five years later, he passes the attending exam — and the Chinese medicine he had has been forgotten.
In our colleges today, many teachers can give a class. A, B, C…; 1, 2, 3, 4…; their layers on the blackboard are clear and tidy. But once you put them in front of a patient, they cannot diagnose. There are students with sick relatives and friends who cannot get better, who come find the teacher at his outpatient clinic — and the teacher cannot cure them either. So the student feels the work has no spirit. Today there are no few PhDs, no few master's degrees; they can all cure mice in the lab, but they cannot cure people.
To move TCM study into the form of the school is to be acknowledged as a step forward — but how to change matters. To change after the Western-medical pattern, or to change after Chinese medicine's own cultural tradition — these are not the same. Today our TCM colleges have changed — but changed in the pattern of Western-medicine colleges. So in the seventies, a German professor lecturing at Xiyuan Hospital said: "Why do you take a thing that is not yet two hundred years old, not yet fully formed, that has not yet reached its own conclusions, and use it to ruin a thing that has five thousand years of experience, that is mature, that has reached its own conclusions, that has its own laws? Why do you treat what was brought in on a gunboat as a treasure?"
Our TCM institutions today are exactly that. They are forcibly stuffing a Chinese medicine with five thousand years of experience into a Western medicine with only two hundred years of experience. Chinese and Western medicine each have their own inner law. But now we have already violated Chinese medicine's own inner law and used a Western frame to carve up Chinese medicine. We should change — but Chinese medicine has five thousand years of experience, and that cannot be thrown away. Chinese medicine should stand outstandingly on its own feet.
Excerpted from Modern Education News, August 10, 2001