Actually, the achievements we have made are better than the article reported above. Let us make a comparison taking malignant melanoma for example.
When I read the article published by New England Journal of Medicine I flew to Shanghai immediately to see one of my fellow friends. We found a medical record from 1991 in the People’s Hospital of Shanghai, which recorded a 59-year-old male patient with nasal bleeding for a month. The X ray showed there was a seven-centimeter tumor inside his sinus (above the nasal cavity). It was proved to be a malignant melanoma by biopsy. He received surgery in that hospital, which discovered the tumor had invaded adjacent tissues and lymph nodes which
could not be removed. After that he was given radiation therapy but this failed. So the patient discharged from that hospital and came to the hospital that my friend worked in where he received immunotherapy. After six months, most of the tumor disappeared. After continued immunotherapy, there was no evidence of the tumor after one year. The patient returned to his normal life. Until early 2004, the patient had nasal bleeding again, so further checkups revealed the tumor had relapsed. He died of pulmonary infection. I also took his second medical
records in 2003. Counting from the patient’s first hospitalization, he had survived for nearly 14 years, among which he was in a disease-free state for at least 12 years.
Another patient that I treated personally, Mr. Gao from Jiangyin City, Jiangsu Province, could not see clearly in 2001. Later he was diagnosed with iridic melanoma in Shanghai and underwent surgery. In 2003, he felt liver pain, so he had checkups in one hospital in Shanghai which discovered there were multiple nodules in his liver, later proven to be liver metastases through biopsy. He was told by his doctor he had a
survival rate of three months. His family held a meeting to discuss how to arrange the funeral. Mr. Gao was not discouraged, he was admitted to our hospital, receiving liver cryoablation and immunotherapy. Following this his liver metastasis stopped progression, then shrunk, finally most of the tumor disappeared. He returned to normal work and life (Figure 11). Although he finally died of gastrointestinal bleeding, he was disease-free for four and a half years, enjoying his life. He made the most of this regained life to work as a volunteer for
Jiangyin Cancer Society to serve cancer patients.
The condition of these two patients are similar to the patient reported by the American authors, but one patient of ours survived for fourteen years and the other survived for more than four years. In 2010, I made a presentation report about the latter patient in an international academic annual meeting in Japan, which was unanimously praised by participants.