Finding The Old Way Through *Not* Treating Cancer
The ancient cosmic river awaits.
In the United States I cannot legally treat cancer with herbal medicine, acupuncture, or other holistic modalities. What I can do is provide what is called “cancer support”. This means I help to alleviate the suffering that stems from not only the disease but also the chemotherapy and radiation. In various other countries it is legal to use herbs and energetic work to treat the cancer itself and they do so with varying degrees of success, similarly to pharmaceutical treatment domestically. In America, however, holistic medicine does not treat cancer.
Let’s step away from America for a moment.
Where it’s legal, there are two schools of thought within Chinese Medicine regarding how to treat cancer. The first is the most common. In this methodology the practitioner uses herbs that have been shown through clinical research to reduce various cancer markers. Many of these herbs have primarily been researched on mice in labs. They give the mouse cancer then they see which herbs make the tumors shrink. Then—in human cancer treatment—these herbs are given conjunctively with pharmaceuticals or on their own.
The second way is the old way. In this school of thought you are essentially acting as if you are a practicing doctor from 2,000 years ago and cancer isn’t even a word yet. You use all of the ancient formulas and strategies and you treat the signs and symptoms. If it’s hot, you cool it. If it’s stagnant, you move it. Whatever it needs to achieve harmony and balance, you do that thing. Surprisingly, the majority of acupuncture & herbal medicine practitioners in China are now relatively westernized in their thinking and do not practice in this manner. This seems counterintuitive, but the ancient and authentic forms of Chinese Medicine are hard to find.
Dr. Liu Lihong is one practitioner utilizing the old way in China. There, where it is legal, he will treat cancer using the same methods that have been used for thousands of years. He says the following regarding modern herbal treatment of cancer with the scientifically-researched anti-cancer herbs Banzhilian and Baihuasheshecao:
If a cancer patient comes to you, do not let your head swim with desire to give him Banzhilian or Baihuasheshecao in order to combat the cancer. This is not Chinese Medicine. At best, it is the sort of Chinese Medicine practiced by a dabbler in the art.
Banzhilian and Baihuasheshecao are both what are considered to be highly researched and effective cancer herbs. This means they work really well on mice with artificially induced cancerous masses. But what if the properties of these herbs are not what you need to bring your system back into balance? What if you are not a mouse?
Here is how Dr. Lihong treated a patient with colon cancer:
He had diarrhea five to eight times a day, which initially consisted of loose stools and then became clear fluid. Besides the liquid feces, the patient also suffered from serious thirst, and drank almost incessantly. Each day, the patient drank two large thermoses (approximately five liters) of water. Six months before I saw him, he began receiving adjunct Chinese Medicine treatment, but its effects were not significant. Looking over the formulas that had been used by previous physicians, I saw that most were formulas to strengthen the spleen and dry dampness or formulas to consolidate the kidneys and astringe: Shen Ling Baizhu San, Xiang Sha Liujun Tang, Bupi Yichang Wan, etc. I can understand the thought process behind the use of these formulas, and we should be thankful that previous physicians had not prescribed bitter cold “anti-cancer” herbs. The patient suffered from chronic diarrhea, so from the perspective of modern viscera-bowel (zangfu) diagnosis methods, it is quite natural to focus on the spleen. However, if one has studied the Treatise on Cold Damage and learned to differentiate the six conformations of disease, then I believe there is absolutely no way that one could focus their treatment on the spleen and Taiyin. Why? Because of line 277 from Treatise on Cold Damage: “Spontaneous diarrhea without thirst belongs to Taiyin.” Here we have a patient that drinks two large thermoses of water a day. How could this possibly be Taiyin disease?
So how does one approach a condition such as I have described above? The patient’s bowel movements were disinhibited, but loose stools can occur in any of the six conformations. The patient was thirsty and drank copious amounts, meaning that he suffered from dispersion-thirst (xiaoke). Diarrhea together with thirst is unique to the Jueyin conformation of disease. Thus, there is no doubt that the treatment for this illness must be determined from the perspective of Jueyin disease; Wumei Wan must be used.
Based on this, I prescribed to this patient the original Wumei Wan, without adding or subtracting a single ingredient. I prescribed three or four days worth of this medication at each visit, and by the third time I saw him, the patient’s thirst and the amount he drank were reduced considerably. Instead of drinking two thermoses of water a day, he drank just one, and his watery diarrhea improved significantly as well.
Wumei Wan—an ancient Chinese herbal formula—for cancer? This is not a known cancer remedy… modern herbal researchers would be beside themselves.
And yet, here we are.
Dr. Lihong also gives an example of his colleague “Old Liao” treating bone cancer:
Among cancers, bone cancer is one of the most intensely painful. This pain is also very difficult to treat. Even the use of strong anesthetics may not help much. Old Liao had a trump card when treating this sort of pain. Although bone cancer often turns out to be incurable, he could get rid of the pain very quickly, and this went a long way toward relieving the patient’s suffering. What medicine did he use? He would add a special ingredient to some medicinal herbs and then the patient would bathe the affected part repeatedly in the resulting decoction until the pain gradually disappeared. This particular ingredient was very efficacious. If added, the pain would stop quickly. Without it, the decoction did nothing. And what was the special ingredient? It was plant material that had grown out of soil from beneath a buried decomposed coffin. In the past, when a person died in China, their body was put in a wooden coffin and buried. The body slowly began to rot, and the rotten remains oozed into the wooden bottom of the coffin. This putrid material joined with the very fiber of the wood, and, after a time, from this special wood at the bottom of the coffin, this special ingredient began to grow. One can imagine the quintessential putrescence this wood contained after receiving the sluggish infusion of a corpse’s decomposition. In accordance with the above passage from the Yellow Emperor’s Classic, one must realize that whatever grows in such a rotting and festering material would have a strong affinity with the kidneys, and by extension with the bones of the body, since the bones are understood in Chinese Medicine to pertain to the kidneys. This explains, from a classical Chinese Medicine perspective, why such an organism would contain the medicinal properties that allow it to assist in treating bone cancer. At one point, I asked Old Liao who had taught him this method. Old Liao did not go into all the whys and wherefores. The method was not inherited from anyone else, nor was it adopted from a strict theoretical framework. His thinking was that bone cancer is a remarkably insidious and strange disease, and so a strange and unique medicine was called for. In this, he employed the method of curing like with like. He never dreamed that the effect would be as dramatic as it turned out to be.
As a practitioner myself I have limited but profound clinical experience with cancer. A while back I had a patient who was on chemotherapy and radiation for a considerable amount of time attempting to treat a notoriously fatal form of rapidly spreading cancer. Eventually their doctors gave up and said it was pointless to do more. At that point, I essentially had carte blanche to use herbs, acupuncture, and moxibustion not to “treat cancer” but to treat everything that this patient was feeling and experiencing and everything that I was observing. The old way.
I used a weekly “Earth Qi Line” treatment with needles and moxibustion combined with an herbal formula to tonify all the bodily systems that had been ravaged not just by cancer but by chemotherapy and radiation. To be as straightforward as possible here: I was not treating cancer, per se, I was treating the patient as the patient presented clinically.
Truthfully, in my mind there was little hope for any positive results. This was one of my favorite patients, however, and I would have done anything to help alleviate their suffering so we continued weekly together with 100% of my efforts. Something tells me it was this lack of any sort of rational hope combined with a willingness to push on no matter what with love and determination that was part of what followed.
In this instance in which the cancer was deemed untreatable by their oncologists, the patient and I had no expectations of treating or healing their cancer. My only treatment goal was comfort and peace. I worked hard for my patient using all the tools I had at my disposal. I poured my heart into those treatments.
And with pouring my heart out I simultaneously let go.
It brings to mind a healing method developed by a friend called Resonant Attention wherein the most challenging and critical part of the process is letting go of the outcome. This method relies upon the underlying current of benevolence that is trying to sweep you up into its rapture at every turn of your life. You can try to swim upstream as much as you want, but when you allow yourself to let go you find you can just float along harmoniously. Using this technique of allowance, I was able to implement Chinese Medicine as it was originally intended within the archetypal alchemical space that churns out reality like a waterfall.
While I was able to let go and allow life to unfold for this process, my focus was like a laser during our time together. Every moment we spent was as if we would enter another dimension. Tears were shed a couple times as I needled and applied moxa, but I never showed them. I just kept going, treating the signs and symptoms. Doing things the old way.
After six weeks of treating in the ancient style of Dr. Lihong & Old Liao, my patient entered the treatment room with “miraculous” news that their doctors couldn’t understand: the cancer had stabilized and stopped spreading. I lifted my patient’s withered body up off the table in a gentle bear hug with a tear in my eye and an ear-to-ear smile. It was a moment I’ll always remember.
The next week the doctors decided that because the prognosis had improved, they would resume chemotherapy and radiation immediately. Upon resumption of traditional pharmaceutical care, my patient deteriorated fairly rapidly and passed shortly after spending a final Christmas with my family.
It is beyond my scope of practice to suggest one use Old Liao’s putrid, rotting, festering bone juice over standard pharmaceutical care. That is not the point of this. I would, however, take Old Liao over whatever herbs they give to the little white mice if it were my own health decision to make.
In the end, what I’m trying to convey is that there is an ineffable magic to holistic medicine that is accessible to all of you. The lessons I learned from this whole experience somehow didn’t have a lot to do with cancer itself. I think it was more about hope in the face of certain defeat, accessing impossible possibilities through allowance, and—if I may say it—love for a dear patient whom I truly cared about.
I still don’t “treat cancer”. But this experience fundamentally changed the way I approach the myriad conditions that walk through my clinic door. I invite all of my patients and readers to step into this primal state and see what the old way offers them. I’m honored to punch your ticket to the alchemical cosmic river of infinite benevolent possibilities any time.
See you at your next appointment.
—Jaime