[Reprint] Give Up Illusions, Seek Survival in Lower Dimensions: The Final Discourse on Traditional Chinese Medicine, Western Medicine, and the Truth About Survival

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Notes

There are top-tier doctors, but they’re not accessible to ordinary people.

Original Article

This article was transcribed by SimpRead. Original URL: mp.weixin.qq.com

Disclaimer: I do not participate in any online factionalism. This piece is a “de-illusioned dialectical logic” I write for ordinary patients like myself. I’ve stewed together the concepts of “Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), Western medicine, miracle healers, resources, and social class,” and laid it all out at once. People like me—ordinary cancer patients—don’t need faith; what we need is clarity in commanding our own bodies amid the high uncertainty and high stakes of the cancer battlefield, so we can reclaim even a sliver of agency over “how long we live” from sheer luck.

Fighting cancer isn’t like clearing levels in a video game—it’s more like sailing on a leaking boat.

The more accurately you repair it, the slower it sinks.

Every time I write an article that refuses to take extreme sides, both camps come after me.

But I’m a cancer survival blogger, not a TCM or Western medicine advocate.

I only share my personal insights.

May the few cancer patients or healthy individuals who resonate with me read this calmly till the end.

By Captain

On the internet within cancer patient circles, is there any topic more annoying than “TCM vs. Western medicine”?

On one side are the “anti-TCM” crowd, dismissing traditional medicine as witchcraft and placebo, waving the stick of double-blind trials to sweep away all empiricism…

On the other are the “pro-TCM fans,” addicted to folk legends and conspiracy theories, firmly believing that real masters must be hiding among the common people, convinced that Western medicine is just a scythe wielded by capital to harvest profits from us.

When we’re healthy, these arguments are merely casual chatter. You can pick sides, look down on others, quote classics just to win a verbal fight.

But when you’re holding a diagnosis report in your hand, or when you or a loved one lies in a hospital bed enduring pain and fear, those annoying debates suddenly become profoundly meaningful.

Because you desperately want to use every possible means to survive—but tumors and time allow little room for error.

I am a cancer patient. After eight years and six recurrences, my struggle for survival has forced me to become an observer and deep scholar of medicine. I’ve also accompanied over 700 patients across various cancer types, understanding their conditions, treatment processes, and outcomes. I’ve seen too many families ruined financially and emotionally due to misguided beliefs, and too many people swinging between blind faith and extreme rejection, ultimately missing critical windows for intervention.

At the request of fellow patients who have consistently supported me through donations, I’m updating this controversial text once again.

I’ll speak a few truths. These words may sound harsh, challenge your established beliefs, or even leave you feeling hopeless. But please understand:

Only by seeing the true colors of life can life have quality.

Below is my ultimate understanding of this medical world…

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01 | The Paradox of Miracle Healers: They May Exist, But Not For Us Ordinary People

The first dialectic we need to resolve is the concept of the “miracle healer.”

Does TCM have miracle healers?

Yes. I never doubt that.

But I’ve never met one, nor do I expect to.

Because even if such miracle healers truly exist, they wouldn’t be available to someone like me.

Since my first cancer diagnosis, I’ve consulted more than ten well-known TCM practitioners—at city, provincial, and even national levels.

Before getting cancer, I worked in R&D and production for health products (plant and animal extracts), and my social circle included PhDs, professors, and top experts in herbal medicine, both domestically and internationally.

I’ve seen more TCM doctors, taken more herbal remedies, and known more insiders than most fellow patients.

Yet I concluded: “My talent and fortune aren’t sufficient—TCM and I were never meant to be.”

If we acknowledge medicine as a discipline rooted in experience, and recognize the human body as an extremely complex system, then from a probabilistic perspective and millennia of accumulated medical cases, such individuals must exist:

Those who have mastered this field to its utmost degree.

But I don’t believe they’re the self-proclaimed “folk masters” on short-video platforms—many of whom lack even formal medical licenses—or charlatans who manipulate emotions and stories to exploit the elderly.

They are true grandmasters.

Their perception of bodily rhythms, sensitivity to subtle disease progression, precision in handling medicinal properties, and mastery of formula composition (monarch-minister-assistant-envoy) transcend textbook dogma, reaching an almost “intuitive” artistic level. Like a master chef who doesn’t need recipes or scales to create exquisite dishes, or a driver with 20+ years of experience who instinctively reacts to road emergencies without conscious thought.

Such people certainly exist.

But here comes the second, rather cruel truth:

These miracle healers are almost irrelevant to people like you and me.

They exist—but from the start, they operate outside the rules of ordinary life.

Many people’s image of a “miracle healer” still follows the template of martial arts novels:

A hermit in a remote mountain hut, white-haired yet youthful, using a handful of herbs to bring the dead back to life.

These stories have circulated for centuries—not because they’re true, but because they comfort ordinary hearts.

They don’t solve medical problems—they address a psychological one:

When pushed to the edge by reality, when modern medicine delivers a death sentence, people crave a “miracle escape.” If we didn’t believe there might be miracle healers in the mountains, we’d question civilization itself, and the meaning of effort.

Let’s shift perspectives—let’s consider resources.

You know I went into debt due to cancer, and became a cancer blogger to raise funds for my mother’s treatment—selling sea cucumbers, relying on donations, begging publicly.

Is there anyone in this world who could instantly erase my debt—less than a million yuan, which has driven me to pull out my hair?

Yes.

Open any billionaire list. For those names, nearly a million yuan is just the budget for a single business dinner or vacation trip.

Will they come save me?

No.

Because top-tier resources never engage in “point-to-point” individual rescues. They either operate macroscopically through foundations benefiting humanity, or circulate within tiny elite circles.

They save “projects,” not “specific individuals like me.”

And healthcare—isn’t it essentially a form of resource too?

So where are the real TCM masters?

They’re not in outpatient clinics where you wait in line.
They’re not on TikTok or Kuaishou livestreams.
They’re not in assembly-line clinics seeing dozens of patients daily, spending three to five minutes per person.

They likely exist in low-visibility, high-threshold systems…

In exclusive, non-public special-access channels…

In ultra-expensive, non-scalable private health management services…

These places share one common trait:

They naturally exclude people like me.

But this isn’t discrimination—it’s social structure.

I fully understand this. When I started my自媒体 (self-media), I replied to every single comment personally.

Now, I dare not even open my DMs. As one person without a team, my capacity to process complex inquiries is severely limited.

Truly personalized, one-on-one care has always been, in any era and country, an expensive luxury.

Ordinary people can only access “standardized products.”

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02 | Poverty Disease and Superstition: Rationality Is a Luxury in Desperation

If miracle healers are so inaccessible, why do so many ordinary people like me still desperately believe in “folk remedies” and “miracle healer legends”?

Many intellectuals love to look down and criticize:

It’s ignorance. It’s a lack of scientific literacy.

I disagree with such extreme judgment.

So let me clarify:

Most ordinary people’s blind faith in TCM isn’t due to stupidity—it’s because their cash flow can’t withstand uncertainty.

And poverty isn’t simply about “lacking money.” It’s structural:

You don’t know if another expensive bill will arrive tomorrow.
You don’t know if you’ll survive until the next check-up.

I’ve relapsed six times, bankrupting my family. My last two treatments were funded by public assistance.

But not everyone can shamelessly beg on their knees like I did, accepting kindness from strangers.

So imagine: What does an average working-class family face when confronted with late-stage cancer?

• Long-term, continuous, uncertain costs of Western medical treatment;
  • Repeated tests, increasingly expensive targeted/immunotherapy drugs after developing resistance;
  • ICU bills running thousands or tens of thousands per day;
  • An anticipated outcome of losing both money and life.

Under such financial pressure, human survival instincts force the brain to seek a shortcut.

Then a voice arises inside:

“Is there a way to buy a chance at life with less money?”

That’s when “miracles” begin to seem attractive. Compared to the cold, expensive invoices of Western medicine, a $10 herbal pack or a $5 folk remedy—even with only a one-in-ten-thousand chance—becomes the only straw this family can grasp.

It’s not that people are irrational—it’s that rationality itself is a luxury in desperation.

Rationality is damn like a tourniquet—you hate how tight it feels when you’re fine, but when you’re bleeding out, you realize how precious it is!

That’s why some readers say my writing depresses them, while others find it uplifting.

One man’s honey is another man’s poison.

At this juncture, fake TCM practitioners and fraudsters step in. TCM is forcibly elevated to a role it was never meant to play:

It’s no longer a method for regulation, support, and recovery—but is packaged as “the poor’s only hope to defy fate.”

Fraudsters understand human nature better than legitimate doctors.

A real doctor tells you: Five-year survival rate is 30%, side effects are severe, costs are high.

A fraudster says: Drink my medicine, cured in three months. Money-back guarantee. Cheap cure for serious illness.

The most classic brainwashing phrase:

“Others couldn’t heal you because you never met me.”

Hear that often?

It’s the toxic reaction of combining poverty disease and terminal illness:

It makes you invest your last dollar in a two-yuan lottery ticket promising five million.

As a veteran cancer fighter, I never mock elders sharing “folk cures” on WeChat Moments, nor do I look down on patients searching remote mountains for healers.

They’re just trying, in their humble way, to bypass the brutal laws of this world.

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03

To truly see the situation clearly, we must understand the fundamental differences between TCM and Western medicine.

Many debates go on endlessly because people compare two entirely different systems of production on the same level.

Western medicine is a typical product of industrial civilization.

It relies on standardized equipment, replicable procedures, stable chemical parameters, and scalable output.

The greatest strength of Western medicine lies in this:

Its many “hardware” components are accessible across social classes.

If Elon Musk and I get the same illness, we might lie in the same model of CT scanner. The chemotherapy drug we take has the exact same molecular formula. Our surgeries follow globally standardized guidelines.

The only tiered differences aren’t the machines, but rather access paths, frequency, and the amount of expert attention and service time…

The same consultation—Musk gets it the same day, maybe even top global specialists flown directly to his home—while I wait two months. The same treatment plan—he has a multidisciplinary team monitoring him closely, while I’m told, “Go home and observe.”

Yet despite this, modern medicine remains the backbone of public health systems because:

Like industrial goods, it delivers stable quality, reproducibility, and scalable delivery of “qualified products.”

TCM, however, is a product of handicraft (even agricultural) civilization.

TCM doesn’t rely on machines. It depends on three highly unstable variables:

1. The practitioner (experience, insight, judgment, and even their mood that day);
   • The medicine (origin, harvest year, collection method and timing, processing techniques);
   • The environment (setting, doctor-patient trust, continuity of long-term follow-up).

None of these can be perfectly replicated by industrial assembly lines.

Like handmade porcelain from Jingdezhen—can you ever find two exactly alike?

Even imperial kilns throughout history couldn’t achieve that.

Once you understand this, you realize:

TCM is not “technical medicine”—it’s “resource medicine.”

Western medicine competes on technological advancement; TCM competes on resource access.

Western medicine is like Dehua white porcelain—stable, mass-deliverable qualified products.
TCM is like Jingdezhen artisans—capable of masterpieces, but incapable of mass production.

Judging art by industrial standards, or demanding industrial consistency from art—both are unfair.

Like my wife’s favorite hand-painted fish cups—do they look identical?

An overlooked, painful truth:

Many blame poor TCM outcomes on “unscientific theory” or “incompetent doctors.”

But for true insiders, TCM’s ceiling is often capped by raw materials.

“Even the cleverest housewife cannot cook a meal without rice”—this saying is catastrophic in TCM.

We can share the same MRI machine as Musk, but we’ll never consume the same batch of Chinese herbs. The decoction you drink isn’t the Treatise on Cold Damage itself—it’s the sum of origin + storage + processing + authenticity + supply chain + the doctor’s selection ability. What you’re drinking isn’t ancient formula—it’s supply chain.

Chinese medicinal materials inherently face insurmountable quality stratification.

Authentic “daodi” herbs require specific latitudes/longitudes, soil trace elements, sun exposure, precise harvesting windows, and growth years. (I used to work in plant extract-based health products—this is my domain.)

To exaggerate: Wild century-old ginseng vs. greenhouse-grown fast-matured ginseng—same name, perhaps similar chemical profiles, but clinical effects and potency? Just imagine.

This isn’t mysticism—it’s resource stratification.

(Can my Weihai sea cucumbers (3+ years growth) be the same as 3-month lab-grown “tech sea cucumbers” sold on e-commerce platforms?)

Like Wuchang rice. The core plot yields are fixed.

Eating regular rice won’t kill you—but “top-tier taste” was never meant to feed the entire world.

The rarest tier of herbs can never be universally accessible.

This leads to an inevitable outcome:

Once TCM “goes mainstream,” once it attempts to “democratize,” it inevitably degrades.

What happens when billions seek TCM and consume herbal medicine?

1. Material degradation: Authentic wild herbs →异地 cultivation → industrial chemical farming → sulfur-fumigated low-grade products.
   • Time degradation: Individual prescriptions → computer-generated formulas → mass-produced patent medicines.
   • Judgment degradation: Intuitive four-diagnostic methods (observation, listening/smelling, inquiry, pulse-taking) → prescribing based solely on lab reports.

What’s left for ordinary people is often just the “shell of TCM.”

The decoction you drink may come from outdated ancient texts, but the herbs are fast-grown farm produce. Expecting such “industrial replicas” to achieve the “miraculous effects” described in obsolete texts—that itself is unscientific.

And the cheaper, more accessible TCM is to ordinary people, the closer it gets to “weak TCM.” Not because ordinary people don’t deserve better—but because Earth’s resources don’t allow it.

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04

After all this, does TCM hold no value for ordinary people?

Of course not.

As someone who’s faced death, my conclusion is:

TCM is useful—but only if placed in its proper role.

If you remember only one thing from my writing, remember this:

In most real-world scenarios, attempting to “eliminate tumors” with TCM is a mistake.

Let me put it bluntly:

If during a tumor’s explosive growth phase, you blindly trust a miracle healer, abandon surgery, chemo/radiotherapy, targeted or immunotherapy, and expect herbal soup to “drink away the tumor,” that’s not faith in medicine—that’s voluntarily exiting the survival game.

Because Western medicine follows a war logic.

Its keywords: Identify enemy, precision strike, full firepower, eliminate at all costs.

In critical moments when tumor burden is high and organs are at risk of compression, you need overwhelming force—surgical knives and chemo drugs as “heavy weapons.”

But TCM follows an ecological logic.

Its keywords: Adjust environment, repair systems, clear blockages, delay disorder.

TCM excels at improving the body’s “soil,” making it less hospitable for weeds (disease) to grow wildly.

Therefore, we cannot use agricultural methods to fight wars.

When the enemy has already stormed the city gates, you shouldn’t still be focusing on internal farming and crop planting…

It’s simply too late—and fundamentally wrong.

Conversely, you can’t expect warfare methods to solve ecological problems.

After Western medicine’s heavy weapons have bombarded the battlefield, killing most cancer cells, your immune system (“righteous qi”) may also lie in ruins. If you keep relentlessly bombing with chemo, even if enemies remain, your base collapses first.

That’s when TCM might enter its optimal window.

In my ideal survival framework, TCM should only do three things—and only these three:

1. Improve tolerance: Repair trenches, reinforce dikes—help the body endure Western medicine’s heavy weapons without being crippled by side effects.
   • Improve quality of life: Eat, sleep, defecate, no pain. Survival isn’t just a cold metric—it’s a lived experience. If the tumor remains, but I can walk, eat, manage household affairs—that’s victory.
   • Extend the stalemate period: When Western options are exhausted or the body can no longer tolerate chemo, TCM’s “living with tumor” strategy might stretch 3 months into 6—or longer. Not eliminating the tumor, but preventing immediate explosion. Turn close combat into a war of attrition.

But these are all theoretical—I can’t access top-tier TCM due to my limitations.

Do I think it works? Based on reasoning alone, yes, it’s possible.

I don’t blindly attack TCM like many others, calling it unclear mechanism or mysticism.

Because I believe: Humanity facing the complex biological system is like looking up at the starry cosmos. When will we ever truly understand it?

The human body isn’t a simple mechanical clock that can be disassembled and fixed. It’s a chaotic entity with countless variables.

Imagine a patient post-chemo: blood counts normal, liver/kidney functions perfect, all Western indicators “ideal”—yet he can’t get out of bed, just waits to die. At this point, Western medicine is helpless—because “indicators” show no anomaly.

Now, suppose one dose of herbal soup, guided by TCM’s holistic regulation logic, opens his appetite, stops night sweats, helps him stand and walk.

You ask me: What molecular mechanism? Which pathway activated? I don’t know—current science may not explain it either.

But as a patient, I don’t care about mechanisms. Last month, I spent 800 yuan on herbal tonics to regulate qi and blood…

If TCM brings positive value (improved quality of life), then it has value. I’m not defending TCM—I’m merely recording: Sometimes, random desperate efforts can drag a person back from hell.

(Since my second recurrence, I’ve used off-guideline Western treatments. So I have no right—and no desire—to belittle any approach based on data.)

Even if part of TCM’s effect is truly placebo, so what?

Modern psychoneuroimmunology has long proven: Belief directly regulates the immune system.

For a patient long stripped of control, sentenced to death, having one daily act—brewing and drinking medicine—as the “only thing I can do for myself”—that sense of agency is powerful medicine.

Science is just a flashlight—not the damn sun. What it illuminates is called “evidence,” but what it doesn’t reach isn’t necessarily nonexistent…

If you strip away this last shred of hope, telling the patient, “It’s all fake—just wait to die,” you may win the argument, but you lose ethically in medicine.

Enough said. Let’s return to the original question.

TCM, Western medicine, miracle healers, folk remedies, miracles… In the cancer battlefield, how should ordinary people survive?

My advice: Don’t become a “TCM fanboy,” nor a “Western medicine zealot.”

For ordinary people, the only correct survival posture is:

Don’t deify, don’t take sides, don’t fantasize, don’t surrender.

• Use Western medicine’s industrial power to win urgent, critical battles.
  • Use TCM’s ecological wisdom to heal wounds invisible to Western medicine.
  • Beware of “miracle healers” profiting from intellectual taxes, yet remain awed by life’s unknown potential.
  • Acknowledge the class nature of resources, and play the optimal combination within your limited budget.

Those who truly survive are never the theorists arguing online until red in the face.