“Great news! Mom’s arterial thrombosis has disappeared!”

I could not believe my eyes when I read the text message from my sister on Wednesday morning.

I picked up the phone and called my mother immediately. Before I could say a word, mom laughed heartily at the other end of the line in my hometown of Yangzhou City, less than 300 kilometers away from Shanghai.

What a pleasure for our family.

Mom’s thrombosis, an arterial blood clot in her left leg, was discovered about two months ago. Doctors concluded it could not be cured except through expensive surgery. Aware of the risks of arterial surgery on a 79-year-old patient, my sister, brother and I persuaded our mother not to take the risk. She agreed.

Doctors then gave mom a basic treatment of transfusion to ease the pain in her leg, but warned that, without a surgery, a complete cure was out of the question. They wished us good luck.

In the past few weeks, I was afraid of receiving any message or phone call from my sister, who also lives in Yangzhou and takes care of my parents’ daily needs.

Indeed, I had been at my wit’s end each time my sister called to complain about mom going ballistic and becoming irrational about her leg problem. She acted as though her life were doomed.

Acupuncture dismissed

So convinced were my mother and sister about the Western medicine practiced by their doctors, that they always dismissed my suggestion that they try acupuncture to ease the blood flow and reduce discomfort in the leg.

“At this stage of my illness, traditional Chinese medicine can’t do anything,” Mom would tell me, although she herself was an accomplished TCM doctor before she retired more than 20 years ago.

Due to my insistence, mom finally agreed that my 86-year-old father could try to treat her leg with acupuncture.

He used to be military and civilian doctor trained in both Western and Chinese medicine. His acupuncture skills had largely been unused for the better part of his life as he focused on Western medicine and hospital management before retiring.

No one in our family believed dad would work wonders this time, but after barely a month of acupuncture treatments, my mother’s arterial thrombosis disappeared. She received an ultrasound test on Wednesday morning and everyone was surprised with the result.

Mom’s case shows that inexpensive, traditional treatments should not always be dismissed in favor of expensive Western treatment.

This is not to say traditional medicine is superior in all regards, but doctors should refrain from giving patients only expensive prescriptions.

This brings me to a recent news report that has drawn nationwide attention: A hospital doctor in Sichuan Province has been removed from her post as director of the ultrasound department for having refused to over-charge patients.

According to media reports on January 10, Dr Lan Yuefeng was kicked out of her department and has “worked” as a “consultant” by walking around in passageways for about two years.

Unnecessary surgeries

This all began in May 2009, when Lan refused to collude with other doctors in the People’s Hospital in Mianyang City to perform unnecessary and expensive heart and leg surgeries on a 53-year-old patient.

“Doctors over-charging a patient with unnecessary treatment is no different from thieves stealing from others’ purses,” Dr Lan was quoted in the media as saying.

She is just one of the victims of a medical system in which many hospitals care more about kickbacks and profits than about the health of patients.

Wang Hufeng, an expert on medical reform at People’s University in Beijing, told the Qianjiang Evening News last week that expensive and unnecessary surgeries account for a big part of “excessive treatment.”

Hu Dayi, an expert on cardiovascular health at People’s Hospital under Beijing University, was quoted in the same report as saying that the number of cardiac intervention surgeries across China soared from 20,000 in 2000 to 408,000 in 2011, largely due to excessive treatment.

“In certain cases, doctors install as many as three stents in a patient’s heart,” he said. My mother told me that one of her neighbors now has seven heart stents!

According to Hu Dayi, less than half of patients with cardiac problems in Europe are given heart stents, while nearly 80 percent of their counterparts in China have them. He said that in many cases stents, mesh tubes used to treat narrow or weak arteries, are unnecessary, because regular medicines are effective.

If you browse today’s news reports about excessive treatment, you will see that it’s mostly blamed on doctors’ and hospitals’ single-minded pursuit of profits.

That’s true, but that’s not the whole story. The largely unspoken part of the story is the significant lack of capable traditional Chinese medicine experts. Before my father had a chance to cure my mother’s leg with acupuncture, my sister had visited many hospitals in Yangzhou and few doctors would dare to try acupuncture. My father was not sure it would be effective, either.

TCM is not a cure-all, of course, but its potential is far from being fully tapped.

I caught a serious cold in Chengdu last month, where I attended a class on traditional incense culture. I coughed very hard, unable to sleep for two consecutive nights. I would have taken anti-inflammatory drugs if I were in Shanghai. But in Chengdu, I found myself completely cured in two days without taking any medicine. I just inhaled incense made of traditional Chinese herbs developed by Mr Fu Jingliang, a pioneer devoted to the revival of ancient incense culture.

Herbal incense does not cure diseases the way medicines do, it only strengthens the main and collateral energy channels. Herbal incense was highly developed in ancient China, which peaked in the Song Dynasty (AD 960-1279), but today it’s largely a lost treatment.

For more than 30 years, Mr Fu hasn’t visited a single hospital. Once upon a time, hospital staff thought he might have passed away, since they couldn’t understand how an ordinary person could afford not to visit a hospital for such a long time.

But in Mr Fu’s view, there are natural “medicines” within one’s body, and herbal incense can definitely strengthen one’s natural power to fight disease.

The name of this column comes from the Taoist saying that the ultimate good is the way of water.