4. Young People in Society

4. Young People in Society

My relative has stomach cancer and has been consistently taking the traditional Chinese medicine prescribed at your clinic for over 40 days, without undergoing surgery. There are currently two questions I hope Mr. Pei can answer: ① Is it acceptable to rely solely on your herbal medicine without surgery? ② The patient is now extremely weak—her legs lose strength as soon as she walks, and her complexion is very pale. How can we nourish her body? ③ Can she drink meat broth while taking the herbal medicine?

A: Regarding this issue, the correct answer is that surgery should be the first choice, combined with radiotherapy, chemotherapy, and traditional Chinese medicine. This is the general principle. Of course, there are also some patients who firmly refuse surgery and insist on taking herbal medicine. In such cases, we can only follow the patient’s wishes. This involves a medical ethics issue: we cannot persuade patients to abandon surgery in favor of herbal medicine, nor can we convince them that herbal medicine is more effective than surgery, let alone encourage them to give up surgery altogether and rely solely on herbal medicine. Recently, some American scholars, based on evidence-based medicine statistics, have suggested that for certain patients, conservative treatment without surgery yields outcomes statistically indistinguishable from those achieved through surgery. However, this is merely one opinion and should be used only as a reference. Patients with stomach cancer should not drink meat broth due to digestive dysfunction; in traditional Chinese medicine, this is referred to as “deficiency cannot tolerate tonification.”

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