Is chemotherapy always the right choice?

  I have always attached more importance to herbal treatment for malignant tumors. Yes, treatment, not modulation!  Chinese medicine re-dosage including the use of worm-like medicine is a major aspect of my clinical use and research.  In fact, there are times when it is very contradictory, for example, a female patient who was found to have adenocarcinoma of the left lung with multiple metastases in the skull and brain. At the time of admission, the diagnosis had not been confirmed by biopsy, and the patient was immediately treated with heavy doses of Chinese medicine, and the effect was very obvious in 3 days.  Then, the patient was diagnosed as left lung adenocarcinoma with multiple metastases in the skull and brain. According to the NCCN guidelines, the standard treatment mode is systemic chemotherapy + whole brain radiotherapy, and it was impossible for me to fight against the mainstream medical treatment mode.  After the first cycle of chemotherapy, the patient’s life expectancy dropped significantly. Due to the toxic side effects of radiotherapy, the patient suffered from 4th degree bone marrow suppression during the treatment, and his blood picture recovered after blood transfusion and hematopoietic stimulation. By the time complete brain radiotherapy was done, the patient’s physical condition was already far worse than before radiotherapy.  For a part of advanced tumor patients, their survival is basically predictable. Will the effect of using traditional Chinese medicine treatment alone, or traditional Chinese medicine + radiotherapy or traditional Chinese medicine + targeted therapy, necessarily be worse than chemotherapy for these patients? Not necessarily! It is very likely that patients will have longer survival and better quality of life, especially for elderly patients with advanced malignancies.  The current medical situation in China for the most part is: life goes on, chemotherapy goes on! If a person has no quality of life at all, no dignity of life at all, even if he can still lie in bed and live, is it more cruel to live like this!