Wang liming: can traditional Chinese medicine treat cancer?

December 25, 2018 sina technology

Wang liming, professor of life science research institute of zhejiang university, is the author of "what is life", "god's scalpel" and "the biological cultivation of foodie".

Can traditional Chinese medicine treat cancer?

It must be said that it takes some courage to discuss the problem.

A lot of people have said that on the Internet, it is the easiest for two people to quarrel while talking. There are even several topics that turn against each other. Believe it or not, traditional Chinese medicine is one of them, and so is support for genetically modified organisms.

I think avoiding the problem is not the way, and I have the responsibility to analyze this issue of great concern.

This is not a real problem

Can traditional Chinese medicine treat cancer? My first response to this question is that it is not a reasonable, answerable, or worth answering.

Why do you say that? We need to clear up a few technical details first.

First of all, TCM is not a single treatment.

It is slowly accumulated and evolved over thousands of years, including a whole set of human body medical views and medical methodology, including the law of human body operation, the relationship between human and nature, disease prevention, disease treatment and health management. In addition, on the basis of medicine, our ancestors also added more metaphysical and mysterious philosophical theories to TCM, such as Yin and Yang and the five elements. When we discuss the role of traditional Chinese medicine, we must be clear about which specific part of traditional Chinese medicine we are talking about, right?

At the same time, cancer is not a single disease.

Cancer is a disease that happens when cells in the body mutate and start dividing and multiplying uncontrollably. The specific definition and classification of cancer vary with the location and nature of body cells, the genetic mutations they produce, the characteristics and stages of tumor growth. When we talk about cancer treatment, we have to be clear about what cancer we're talking about, right?

So, ask traditional Chinese medicine can cure cancer, in fact, and you walk into the hospital casually asked if you can help me cure, or walk into the university casually asked a teacher to ask if you can let me long ability is the same.

If you don't know exactly what the doctor's department is, what the teacher's specialty is, what kind of medicine you want to treat and what kind of skills you have, this is a false question that can't be answered.

So what's the real problem?

The real question is whether a particular treatment, given a particular treatment, can treat a particular type of cancer. We can try to answer this question.

Gleevex, for example, is a drug that can treat chronic myelogenous leukemia, and it works very well, increasing the five-year survival rate to more than 90 percent; Tereza, for example, is also effective in treating non-small-cell lung cancer patients with EGFR mutations, 80 percent of whom have significantly smaller tumors and significantly longer survival.

You see, given the specific treatment and the specific type of disease, we can answer the question of whether or not we can treat it and whether it works well.

We should do this regardless of western medicine or traditional Chinese medicine, modern or traditional.

There's data to answer that

At this point, the question we asked at the beginning should be asked in a different way.

I can't answer the question whether traditional Chinese medicine can cure cancer. But as long as there are objective data, I can answer whether a particular kind of traditional Chinese medicine can treat a particular kind of cancer.

Of course, you may immediately ask me, you are asking too much! The experience that traditional Chinese medicine treats is historical accumulation come down, where can have so much strict data be used to analyse? Besides, there are many traditional Chinese medicines that are sure to be effective. If they don't work, our ancestors don't need to keep them all the time. Isn't that a waste of time?

Don't worry, I will use a real case to answer, a particular kind of traditional Chinese medicine, can treat a particular kind of cancer. How did doctors and scientists get this answer?

The case occurred nearly half a century ago in northeast China. The protagonist of the story is zhang tingdong, who was then the director of traditional Chinese medicine at the first affiliated hospital of Harbin medical university.

In the early 1970s, zhang tingdong and his colleagues accidentally found that a folk Chinese medicine developed a folk prescription, which can be said to be full of fake poisons: one is arsenic trioxide, is the "outlaws of the marsh" poisoned wu dalang arsenic; Two is light powder, that is, mercury chloride containing mercury components; Three is toad venom, toad secretion.

But this traditional Chinese medicine treats cancer with this folk prescription to fight poison with poison, still cured a lot of esophagus cancer, uterine cancer and leukaemia really patient. < / p > < p > zhang tingdong they quickly took the folk prescription back to the hospital, developed a cancer ling injection, used to treat cancer patients. Some of the therapeutic effects are better, some are worse, and the side effects are quite large.

If this story ends here, friends who support and oppose TCM may start an endless quarrel and take sides again. Because you can either use this story to show that TCM is really useful, or you can use it to demonstrate that the effects of TCM are so variable and unpredictable.

However, they did two very important things in the following time, which made the answer of the question suddenly very clear.

Is the first work, Zhang Ting they in animal experiments and clinical drug trial when the arsenic, light powder, toad venom medicine proportion of these three poisons, it was found that only three things in arsenic is really effective, the other two poison even content has little influence effect, it will greatly alleviate the side effects of drugs.

So they first came to the conclusion that, although this traditional Chinese medicine prescription is based on the principle of fighting poison with poison, it seems that only arsenic is a substance that can really treat cancer drugs.

The second work, zhang tingdong and his colleagues classified and followed cancer patients who received treatment, and found that arsenic was not effective for all cancer patients. It works best for a particular type of cancer - acute promyelocytic leukemia.

This cancer is caused by the mad proliferation of "promyelocyte" cells in the bone marrow. The incidence rate is less than one in 100,000, but the incidence is very urgent and the mortality rate is very high. Zhang tingdong and his colleagues found that arsenic treatment was often the best treatment for these patients.

By the late 1970s, Mr. Zhang and his colleagues had finally come up with convincing data.

They tested arsenic treatment on 55 patients with acute promyelocytic leukemia, and found relief in 70 percent of the patients.

In 1998, the international authoritative New England journal of medicine published a study by American doctors that proved the therapeutic effect of arsenic. Arsenic was used in 11 of 12 patients with acute promyelocytic leukemia with cancer recurrence, and significant therapeutic effects were observed.

Since then, the drug has been really widely used in cancer treatment.

Arsenic, combined with another drug, total trans-retinoic acid, is now the standard treatment for acute promyelocytic leukemia worldwide, with 99% of patients successfully cured!

If gleevey's invention is a victory of modern medical and biological research, the discovery of arsenic cannot be separated from our re-excavation of the practical experience of traditional Chinese medicine and the treasure house of traditional Chinese medicine.

And by the way, another cancer drug that's often associated with arsenic is total trans-retinoic acid. The invention process also has important contributions from Chinese scientists, especially wang zhenyi, winner of China's top science and technology award, and his student Chen zhu, former health minister.

Excavating traditional Chinese medicine: from rough to accurate

So far in the story, I think you can see something.

From three kinds of poison to one kind of poison, from all cancers to one kind of cancer, zhang tingdong and his colleagues actually found a specific drug that can kill a specific cancer cell accurately through detailed research and data analysis step by step, and from the prescription and application scope of traditional Chinese medicine folk prescription which is relatively rough.

By the same analogy, I believe that in the practical experience of traditional Chinese medicine, there must be a lot of practical ways to treat cancer.

But these methods are bound to be crude in principle. After all, for hundreds of thousands of years, without the help of modern chemistry, knowledge of the active ingredients of drugs must have been crude. Without the help of modern medicine and pathology, doctors' knowledge of the scope of drug use must have been crude.

The research of zhang tingdong et al. can truly prove that by studying and analyzing the effective components and application scope of a traditional Chinese medicine prescription, we can find out what specific traditional Chinese medicine can effectively treat a specific cancer.

Cancer is not the only example.

Tu youyou found artemisinin through the analysis of traditional Chinese medicine literature, Chen kehui found ephedrine from the traditional Chinese medicine ephedrine, zhang changshao found changshan alkali from the traditional Chinese medicine changshan, in fact, are all good examples.

Should we use similar logic to continue to explore the magic drugs hidden in traditional wisdom?

We should note that this is not a simple re-analysis of traditional Chinese medicine by means of the so-called western medicine and western medicine. According to what some opponents have said, it is to use the framework of western medicine and western medicine to set up traditional Chinese medicine and suppress traditional Chinese medicine. In fact, I do not agree with any labelling method to judge a drug or a treatment -- call him traditional Chinese medicine, western medicine, traditional and modern medicine, I do not think it is necessary. Despite these labels, there is an easier way to determine whether a drug is good or not.

Just look at what zhang tingdong and his colleagues have done: everything they have done, in fact, has a very simple starting point -- to benefit patients.

Through the analysis of the elimination of light powder and toad venom in the folk prescription, can reduce side effects, while not affecting the efficacy of arsenic, this kind of thing to benefit patients must be done? By confirming that arsenic only affects one particular type of cancer, other patients can be prevented from receiving unnecessary treatment. Is it necessary for patients to benefit from this?

And how do you prove that an operation benefits the patient?

It's easy. It depends on the data!

This data can come from rigorously designed clinical trials like gleevec's and teresha's. To design a clinical trial, patients with a particular disease were randomly divided into two groups. One group received the tested drug, such as gleevex or teresha, and the other group received a so-called placebo without any active ingredient. But doctors and patients themselves do not know who is taking which medicine.

And then, if the first group of patients gets remission and reversion compared to the second group, then we can say that the drug actually works for the disease.

At the same time, like the story of arsenic, this data can also come from the re-analysis and re-arrangement of practical experience in the real world (sometimes called "real world study"). As long as it is objective and comprehensive data, no matter who collects it, no matter it is traditional Chinese medicine or western medicine, we can accept it.

Isn't that a tall order? We can't decide what medicine to take when we are sick, or what medicine to take when our relatives and friends are sick, can we?

Now we can go back to the question we raised at the beginning.

Can traditional Chinese medicine treat cancer?

I still can't answer the question.

But through zhang tingdong's example, we should have enough confidence to say that both modern medical research and drug development, as well as traditional Chinese medicine practice, can help produce medical knowledge and upgrade medical technology.

As long as we speak with data, with reason and wisdom, let drug development step by step from rough to accurate, the ultimate benefit, is the cancer patients, is all of us.