Man of medicine, beacon of hope
Print Edition
DR Ching-Hon Pui literally works around the clock in the search for more effective treatment of childhood leukemia. He gets up at 3am to communicate with specialists and health officials all over the world.
“I don’t like the term ‘survival rate,’ which is for doctors,” he said. “Even though the rate is 99 percent, there are 1 percent of families in deep pain because they have lost a child to leukemia. I can’t accept the death of any patient.”
Pui, 64, who was born in Hong Kong of Shanghai parents, holds US citizenship and is chair of the Department of Oncology at the renowned St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. He is medical director of the St. Jude International Outreach China Program and helped found the International Childhood ALL (acute lymphoblastic leukemia) Working Group to facilitate collaboration in international research.
He was recently appointed to the Chinese Academy of Engineering, one of the nation’s top academic institutions. The list of his achievements is long and the awards on his mantelpiece are many, but Pui is not one to dwell on professional pedigree when there’s work to be done. While in Shanghai for an international medical forum on children’s hematology, tumor and congenital heart disease, he agreed an interview with Shanghai Daily to discuss his life in medicine.
“Actually, I really don’t care much about the appointment as a Chinese Academy of Engineering academician, but that fame is really useful to me in raising more donations for poor children suffering from leukemia and to raise public awareness about the disease,” he said.
Pui said he has been interested in medicine since his childhood.
“I wanted to be a doctor who can cure leukemia after watching movies where people died of the disease,” he said.
He told one interview that he was encouraged by a high school biology teacher to study medicine in Taiwan. He graduated from the National Taiwan University in 1977 and went to the United States to practice medicine.
“At the time, I wanted to be pediatrician,” he said.
Pui has been with St. Jude’s for 39 years. He is a considered an eminent leader in the research and treatment of childhood leukemia, especially acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), the most common pediatric cancer.
“There is so much knowledge and development in medicine, so I just devote all my time and effort to leukemia so I can achieve a top level of knowledge instead of focusing on more than one disease,” he said. “I want to use my knowledge to help as many children as I can.”
After his successful career in the US, Pui began contacting medical specialists in developing countries to see if he would help their development of leukemia treatment.
“I never forget that I am a Chinese,” he said, “so I tried my best to help Chinese children with leukemia.”
He began contacting Chinese medical specialists in late 1980s and early 90s, donating medical equipment, sharing knowledge and sponsoring Chinese doctors to train in the US. His efforts have helped children’s hospitals in Beijing and Shanghai achieve world-level treatment status.
The oncology department at Shanghai Children’s Medical Center made great strides with Pui’s support and has invited him to be a guest professor at the center for decades.
He recalled one touching moment there in the 1990s.
“A leukemia child held my hands and his parents’ hands as he lay dying,” Pui said. “He told us he was so sorry. We all cried. As a doctor, I felt I had let down this child and his parents. His death reinforced my decision to devote more effort to Chinese hospitals and Chinese children with leukemia.”
Those efforts, received with great gratitude, have helped produce stunning results.
“Pui gave us so much help when we started to develop our department of oncology,” said Dr Tang Jingyan, an oncologist at Shanghai Children’s Medical Center. “He donated to us some of the most advanced equipment from St. Jude and shared his research. China’s ALL diagnosis and treatment capability developed quickly, and our survival rate improved by at least 20 percent because of his efforts.”
Medical capability is only part of the life-death equation. It’s equally important for parents with sick children to have access to treatment.
More than 10 years ago, Pui said, he watched a mother sobbing in front of a hospital in Shanghai because she had no money for her child’s treatment and had to take a sick child home and wait for death.
“That’s when it really struck me that so many Chinese families have no money to treat their seriously sick children,” he said. “I did a small survey and found only 20 percent of Chinese parents can afford their children’s leukemia treatment.”
That was when Pui began fundraising for donations to finance the treatment of impoverished children. He has also lobbied Chinese health officials to standardize leukemia treatment across the nation and expand medical insurance coverage.
It takes about US$14,000 to cover almost all the medical care for one child.
In 2005, Pui invited a group of leading Chinese specialists to St. Jude to work out a guideline for ALL treatment for all Chinese hospitals.
“Though our hospital’s leukemia treatment capability has been in line with international standards,” said Dr Jiang Zhongyi, president of Shanghai Children’s Medical Center, “Pui never stops. He has pushed a new round of cooperative research involving our center and 20 hospitals in the mainland and in Hong Kong, with the aim of raising the recovery rate by 5 to 10 percentage points.”
The Shanghai facility is now building a national children’s medical center under the guidance of Pui to speed up research on childhood diseases, especially cancer.
“I won’t retire until the survival rate for children with leukemia is 100 percent,” Pui said. “Treatment rates, recovery rates and survival rates are all medical data having no meaning to the family who loses a child if treatment fails. I must cling to the belief that we can’t lose a single child.”
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