In recent days, a patient’s experience of seeking medical treatment in the United States has been hotly circulated in the circle of friends on WeChat, causing widespread discussion. It reminded me of an incident last year when I was a visiting scholar studying at Harvard University in the United States. I was living in Brookline by Boston Children’s Hospital, and every evening I went for a walk in the playground of Lawrence Elementary School, and in June, I always met a parent from Yantai, Shandong Province, pushing a seven- or eight-year-old girl. As time went by, we learned from chatting that the little girl had a congenital heart disease and had undergone an unsuccessful operation in a hospital in Beijing. After traveling through famous hospitals in China, there was no good solution, and then she came to Boston Children’s Hospital for treatment. Del Nido, the chief of cardiac surgery at Children’s, has already performed one surgery on her and for the first time since she was born, the little girl has a smile on her face. Another surgery will be done in some time. I went to Boston Children’s Hospital for a visit to the cardiac surgery department through a mentor contact because I was studying cardiovascular disease research at nearby Harvard University. Here, there were often patients on their fourth or fifth surgery, and they were very skilled in prescribing this type of surgery, and the results were excellent. I also saw a case of a child less than 1 year old who was being transferred to ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) after a car accident injury. There are also very complicated congenital heart diseases that can be survived by surgery here. They have two Attending physicians on duty at the same time, and they check in once in the first half of the night and once in the second half of the night, so you can imagine the hard work. Every Saturday morning the entire department, including the chief, discusses difficult and critical cases. This discussion is not a formality, but a clear and thorough discussion of the problem, which ensures that mistakes are not made a second time. Their skills don’t have to be mythical, but there is no doubt that the level is very high. In my cardiac surgery department, the hardware implementation is very good, more than our general wards, and our senior wards are not as well equipped and humanized as their general wards. The software of American hospital exceeds us a lot, the service consciousness of doctors is very strong, and their clinical level is really high, which is shown by the fact that doctors over here have solid basic skills due to good training mechanism, careful surgery, and very stable and good surgical results; thanks to the good cooperation between experienced nurses, physician assistants and respiratory therapists, the level of monitoring room is also very high. Possible reasons for the high level are that in the United States, general undergraduate programs in medicine are not offered. You must graduate from college with a bachelor’s degree and then pass an exam called the MCAT (Medical College Admission Test), which is a full-day exam in four parts that add up to 5 hours and 45 minutes. After you have been admitted to medical school and received your MD degree as expected, you are about 28 years old, but you cannot yet become a doctor. You must continue your residency training for 3 years at one of the designated base hospitals. With this training, you are eligible to take the medical licensing exam, which is the equivalent of a residency license. If you want to further become a specialist (equivalent to a Chinese resident who is relatively fixed in a particular department after a hospital rotation), you will have to undergo another 3-4 years of training and study, and then you will have to do 1-2 years of fellowship and chief resident at a designated national specialty hospital that is not your own unit, so that you can become a specialist after passing the examination. Only after passing the examination can you become a specialist. This training process takes at least 10 years! When a specialist further becomes an attending surgeon, the average level of medical care and research ability is higher than that of Chinese doctors! From my observation, if the financial situation allows, it is worthwhile to go to the US for certain diseases.