I once saw a female patient, 56 years old, in the outpatient clinic. She told me: 1 year ago, she found a mass in her abdomen, and the surgeon suspected it was colon cancer, which was surgically removed, and the postoperative pathology diagnosed it as intestinal tuberculosis. The surgeon advised her to treat the TB, but she did not know where to go for TB treatment, so she went to a hospital to see a TCM doctor. She has been taking Chinese medicine for a year, but she still doesn’t feel well, has a poor appetite and is losing weight, and in the last few months has felt more and more pain in her lower back. I told her that TB could not be cured by taking only Chinese medicine and that she had to be treated with anti-TB western medicine. I hospitalized her and gave her an MRI of her lumbar spine because of her back pain. It was a shock. It was found that she had three lumbar vertebrae with bone destruction and paravertebral cold abscess formation. She was diagnosed with lumbar spine tuberculosis because her surgical pathology had confirmed intestinal tuberculosis a year ago and her lumbar spine MRI was consistent with lumbar spine tuberculosis. We had a consultation with a specialist in spine surgery from Long March Hospital, and surgery was required. After 1 month of anti-tuberculosis treatment, she was transferred to the hospital to have surgery on her lumbar spine. It was a major surgery that required cleaning and removing the necrotic and damaged broken bones, removing the pus, and putting in a metal brace to replace the support and protection function of the lumbar vertebrae. The cost was about 100,000 yuan. In total, the anti-tuberculosis treatment lasted 1.5 years, and the patient recovered relatively well at the end. If this patient had started western anti-tuberculosis treatment after her intestinal tuberculosis surgery, there is a high probability that she would not have developed lumbar spine tuberculosis again and would have been spared the pain of lumbar spine surgery and the $100,000 cost of lumbar spine surgery. Conclusion: First: anti-tuberculosis treatment is necessary after surgical removal of tuberculosis lesions. Second: TB cannot be cured by taking only Chinese medicine. Chinese medicine can be used as an adjunctive treatment, but it cannot treat TB alone. There is another similar case: a 60-year-old male patient with lumbar spine tuberculosis. When he went to our clinic, the doctor wanted to treat him with western anti-tuberculosis drugs, but he said that western anti-tuberculosis drugs had side effects and did not want to take them. Then he went to another hospital to see a TCM doctor, and the old TCM specialist said he could take Chinese medicine. So he became “selectively deaf” to the words of our doctor and took Chinese medicine. After a few months, the tuberculosis in his lumbar spine became more serious, forming a large abscess, and his back pain was so severe that he could not stand or walk and was bedridden. I admitted him to our hospital and gave him intravenous anti-tuberculosis drugs, but the effect was not very good because his condition was too serious. If it gets any worse, he will soon be paralyzed. His wife kept blaming him, saying that he was very stubborn. At that time, he was told to listen to our doctors and take western medicine, but he kept refusing. Later, when he went for spinal surgery, he heard that he needed to have a catheter inserted before the surgery, but he couldn’t get it in and found out that his urethra was also suffering from tuberculosis and was narrow. I don’t know what happened after that, but he didn’t come to my clinic for follow-up. Faced with such a patient, I often have the feeling of “mourning his misfortune and being angry at him”. On the one hand, I sympathize with the patient for being so seriously ill, but on the other hand, I am angry with him for being so self-righteous and self-assertive that he has put his health and even his life in his hands. In the history of mankind, before the discovery of western medicine against tuberculosis, most of the people suffering from tuberculosis had a bad ending. Consider that before the liberation, there were very few Western doctors in our country, and we mainly relied on Chinese medicine to treat the disease, which was probably even better than now, but most of the TB patients died in the end (about three quarters). Once you know this fact, you should know whether to choose Chinese or Western medicine to treat tuberculosis.