Clinical research results at home and abroad for many years have shown that the treatment of colorectal cancer has its own characteristics and rules, and it is not as simple as “operate immediately upon detection”. How to combine and use all kinds of tools for colon cancer, including surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy and targeted therapy, is crucial to the treatment effect of colon cancer patients. Compared with countries in Europe, America, Japan and Korea, the 5-year survival rate of bowel cancer patients in China is lower after surgery, which is not only related to the late detection of disease due to insufficient colonoscopy screening and the large number of progressive cases, but also to the insufficient popularity of standardized multidisciplinary treatment (MDT). This also leads to the significant difference in the treatment effect of bowel cancer in different regions of China. For early-stage bowel cancer patients, direct colonoscopic or laparoscopic surgical resection, followed by decision on whether adjuvant treatment such as radiotherapy or chemotherapy is needed based on pathological results, and formulation of standardized follow-up and review plan is sufficient. However, unfortunately, more than 80% of patients with bowel cancer in China are in the middle to late stage or progressive stage, and even 20% of them already have distant organ metastasis or local invasion when they are found. In such cases, if they directly enter the surgical procedure without MDT discussion, they are likely to take a wrong turn and lose the opportunity to obtain good results. In this regard, some experts are the first in China to explain MDT for bowel cancer into three steps, namely “three-step MDT for bowel cancer treatment”. The first ladder is a multidisciplinary team consisting of oncology surgery, medical science, radiation oncology and radiology, which is common at home and abroad, to evaluate the condition and formulate the treatment process and strategy for the first-time bowel cancer patients. In the second ladder, if the patient enters the surgical process after preoperative radiotherapy or targeted therapy, perioperative safety control is crucial to the success of the surgery, which requires even more close cooperation of multidisciplinary teams, including cardiology, pulmonology, anesthesiology, intensive care unit, etc. At present, patients in China are advanced in age (the average age of bowel cancer patients in Shanghai is 73 years old), and most of them are combined with hypertension, coronary heart disease, diabetes to varying degrees, and have a history of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular accidents or even heart stents. What is more worth mentioning is the third ladder, that is, for the current situation that China’s bowel cancer is mainly middle and late stage cases, and the characteristic of high recurrence rate of bowel cancer after surgery (more than half of the patients will have recurrence and metastasis after surgery), tumor resection is the best choice for such bowel cancer cases. However, the surgery is difficult, technically demanding, risky, and requires multiple surgical departments to operate together. For these complex cases joint attack and hybridized use of techniques from different departments is the only way to achieve radical tumor resection and give patients the possibility of long-term survival.