This week marked the 100th birthday of former President Jimmy Carter. Carter has survived many challenges in his century of life, with the most recent being melanoma that metastasized to his liver and brain. The diehard Nobel-prize winner was first diagnosed at the age of 91, but thanks to surgery and innovative cancer care, he has lived nine years since cancer was found. The 39th President’s survival is specifically attributed to novel immunotherapy, a newer weapon in the arsenal to fight cancer.

The drug that has kept Carter alive was only approved a year prior to his diagnosis, and scientists had only learned about the potential of the human immune system to combat cancer ten years before the drug became available. Remarkably, Chinese medical expert Pan Mingji had been working on similar strategies in Chinese medicine decades prior to these Western scientific breakthroughs of the early 2000’s. Even more incredibly, Dr. Pan’s groundbreaking research is built on ancient Chinese medical theory stretching back 2,000 years or more.

Chinese Medicine’s Balanced Perspective

The discipline of medical anthropology largely derives from the core idea that every system of medicine is a product of its culture. Even Western scientific medicine reflects shared beliefs which emphasize certain perspectives on healthcare while deemphasizing others. Not surprisingly, these differences create a unique set of strengths and weaknesses in each system of healthcare.

Western medicine has always been, and continues to be, a medicine categorized by offensive attacks against pathogens. Culturally, this perspective naturally derives from our Western nomadic and colonial history where violent conflicts with other groups were commonplace. Although we are seeing a shift in recent decades, Western medicine continues to overwhelmingly favor remedial treatment over proactive prevention.

Chinese medicine, however, has always seen health as a balance between the competing forces of righteous normalcy and pathogenic disruption. It is a basic precept in Chinese medicine that diseases will only develop in individuals whose bodily function is impaired and whose defenses have failed. This astute viewpoint has resulted in a nuanced approach to healthcare that not only seeks to isolate the factors causing illness but also assesses and improves any declining bodily function as necessary.

The Role of Wellness in Cancer Prevention

Most cancers occur in older patients (although there is a disturbing recent trend towards cancer in younger individuals). The explanation of why cancer is so much more likely in the elderly primarily relates to the inevitable decrease in immunity as we age. For this reason, it is imperative that we think more about the role of the human immune system in preventing and controlling cancer cells and discover how to leverage this insight in the war against cancer.

The immunotherapy that has bought Jimmy Carter another decade of precious time to spend with family and friends is one way of using new scientific knowledge of how our immunity helps keep cancerous cells in check. The next logical step in modern Western healthcare—borrowing a strategy used for thousands of years in Chinese medicine—is to harness the power of immunity for cancer prevention. In the words of a well-known Chinese idiom, “it is too late to dig a well once you are already thirsty”. Modern science now understands enough about the causes of many types of cancer to acknowledge what Chinese physicians have known for millennia: the best oncology treats cancer before it even occurs.