For the poor, treatment should be of low cost. For the rich it is not the more money spent the better. A week ago, I received an unexpected phone call from Ward 6 informing me that a patient had come to see me and he hoped to take a photo with me. I hurriedly went down to the sixth floor and saw an old man who was being surrounded by some doctors and nurses. I immediately recalled that he was a Chinese from Thailand who was admitted into our hospital five years ago. It was good to see that he was still around. It was in 2006 when his wife and children accompanied him for admission as he was suffering from difficulty in swallowing for half a year. His medical records with the Royal Thai Hospital showed that he had esophageal cancer at the middle section, with invaded adjacent lymph nodes. The pathological diagnosis was squamousepithelialcarcinoma. Considered about the large extent of disease and his old age, surgery was excluded. The patient and his family members also refused chemotherapy and radiotherapy. After he had been admitted, the family declared that: as long as there is no chemotherapy and radiotherapy and the patient does not have to bear “the second pain” (that is “No side effects”), any other kind of treatment is acceptable irrespective of the costs of treatment. In fact, the old man’s family was one of the ten richest families in Thailand. We provided him three types of treatment, namely photodynamic therapy, combined immunotherapy and vascular interventional therapy with traditional Chinese medicine. Eighteen days of such simple treatment had enabled him to live up to 90 years old healthily. We did an examination and found that esophageal cancer was still present but it seemed to be in dormancy. The old man was high in spirit. He pulled me to the bedside of a Thai monk. He asked his son to take a group photo of the monk, himself and me. The Thai monk was suffering from cancer of the tongue and was undergoing treatment. The old man said to the Thai monk, “God bless you! Both of us want to live for another ten years.”
Sun Yan, a well-known chemotherapy specialist and a fellow member of the Chinese Academy of Medicines, said, “Chemotherapy and radiotherapy are not a panacea for all cancer. ….In fact they could add more pain to advanced cancer patients. Therefore the use of chemotherapy and radiotherapy should be carefully weighed. During the course of treatment one should ensure that chemotherapy should be used in moderation and not excessive.” What Sun Yan has said provides a guide to our work daily.