Beating Cancer with Chinese Medicine

May 8, 2011

While watching Oprah with my wife recently, Pam Grier, known for her Foxy Brown role, was a guest on the show.

Grier has been a major African-American actress from the early 1970s.

She says, “People see me as a strong black figure, and I’m proud of that, but I’m a mix of several races: Hispanic, Chinese, and Filipino. My dad was black, and my mom was Cheyenne Indian. So you look at things beyond just race or even religion: I was raised Catholic, baptized a Methodist, and almost married a Muslim.”

In 1988, Grier was diagnosed with stage four cancer and given a few months to live. There was nothing Western medicine could do to save her.

During Grier’s appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show on Thursday, February 3, she said, “My physician said, ‘Western medicine has done all it can, I recommend that you go to Chinatown. You’ll meet these practitioners and you’ll listen to them.’ ”

She started making regular trips to Chinatown in Los Angeles.

In Attitudes Toward Health in China, I wrote, “The focus in China is on prevention — to plan your lifestyle around healthy habits. That’s why early in the morning in China you may find many older Chinese outside exercising using the graceful, poetic movements of Tai Chi to insure health and longevity.”

In Health Care Without Drugs, I wrote, “The history of acupuncture goes back over 8,000 years. One would think if it didn’t work, this medical practice would have ended long ago.”

The use of herbal medicines in China has been traced back to the Zhou Dynasty, late Bronze/early Iron Age, about 2,500 to 3,000 years ago.

In fact, the World Health Organization reports that about 80% of people worldwide use herbal medicines for their healthcare.

All of these facts of Eastern and/or Chinese medicine beg for a question. Why do Western drug companies reserve the right to use the word “cure” and no one else may use it legally?

“As many of you [may not] know the word “cure” is reserved for use of the [Western] medical/pharmaceutical industry only. To use this word in the West is to risk prosecution.” Source: Hulda Regehr Clark, Ph.D., N.D.

“The word “cure” is reserved exclusively for pharmaceuticals; it can never be used with herbs or other nutritional therapies.”  Nick Adams, the Health Ranger at Natural News, says, “I find that to be an interesting double standard.”

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

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Sun Yat-sen’s Last Days – Part 2/3

October 26, 2010

After arriving in Beijing, Sun Yat-sen saw a French doctor who gave him injections to help with his illness.

With his health growing worse, a nurse that worked at a German hospital was sent to his Beijing hotel to care for him.

His condition was so bad that at times he could not talk.

Since the Western medicine wasn’t improving his health, he was convinced by advisors to talk to an herbalist doctor, Ge Lianfu.

Sun Yat-sen told Ge Lianfu that he would give the Chinese medicine to the Western doctors to see if they could copy it. 

Ge said he wasn’t sure if Chinese and Western medicine were interchangeable.

Since Sun was a trained Western doctor, he did not believe that Ge’s treatment was going to work. Ge Lianfu concluded that Sun had liver disease but Sun did not trust the diagnosis.

While staying in the Beijing hotel, Sun was treated by doctors from the US, Germany, Russia and the Peking Union Medical College Hospital.  However, the treatments did not help and his condition worsened.

The western doctors concluded that he needed exploratory surgery. After they cut him open, they discovered liver disease as Ge Lianfu had diagnosed without surgery.  

In fact, Sun was in the final stages of liver cancer. At that time, Western medicine had no treatment to deal with a disease that he must have had for years.

In 1916, Sun had often suffered from abdominal pain and the Western doctors treated him as if he had stomach trouble.

Learn more about Chinese Herbalism (Eastern Medicine)

Return to Sun Yat-sen’s Last Days – Part 1 or continue to Part 3

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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