Chuang Shu-chi: A Woman Warrior in the Battle Against Cancer

On New Year's day of 1986, the Kyodo news service published a special report entitled "Chuang Shu-chi, a Life Spent Preventing Cancer," which was prominently run by more than 40 Japanese newspapers. And the Japanese magazine Woman, Herself, with a circulation of several million, once ran a story entitled "The Secret Behind Princess Michiko's Beauty" that caused quite a stir there. The master who taught the princess her secrets: Chuang Shu-chi.

In Taiwan, books about preserving health that Chuang Shu-chi either wrote or oversaw have gained a large readership. Books such as Healthy Eating have become standards in the field. Business superstar Wang Yung-ching has said if it wasn't for Dr. Chuang's universal exercises, he never would have cured his allergies.

The kindly looking Chuang, a 75-year-old graduate of Japan's Keio University, holds firmly to the Confucian principles espoused in the Doctrine of the Mean: "Taking the central peaceful way, heaven and earth will be in order and the myriad of beasts will thrive." Hale and hardy herself, Chuang believes that cancer comes from an imbalance. Most people, including medical professionals, believe that cancer is the result of the rapid growth of bad--that is cancerous--cells. Yet Dr. Chuang says, "What causes the growth of these bad cells is an imbalance."

"Doing anything excessively can knock things out of balance," she says. Drinking and smoking excessively, constant exhaustion or a sudden change in life style can all lead to cancer.

Modern people's lives grow busier and more complicated by the day, and at some point the body's cells can no longer bear the load. "A life out of balance leads to cells out of balance," explains Dr. Chuang. "And using too many drugs such as antibiotics and hormones can also cause cancer."

Living at peace with cancer?

Working with cancer patients for more than 50 years, she has discovered that the best way to treat hard-to-cure illnesses is to get patients to maintain an appropriate weight and a balance in the functions of every part of the body. In this way, patients have a chance of "living at peace with cancer." She has seen one patient live at peace with cancer for 40 years.

When she was still at medical school, a man injured in a car accident was brought to the university hospital in the middle of the night. His internal organs were so severely damaged that surgery was not possible, and when the doctors' efforts at first aid failed, he died.

Chuang was shocked by a look at this man's internal organs. His stomach, liver and intestines all showed advanced stages of cancer.

After the funeral, she went to talk to the man's family, asking his wife about his lifestyle. She found that this 56-year-old had never suffered from any major illnesses. He hadn't even been troubled with minor ailments such as colds, diarrhea, or a sore back. He was happy every day of his life and always had a good appetite.

His life was very regular. Early to bed and early to rise, he would eat dinner at about 5:00 and be in bed by 9:00. He never felt the pain of cancer, and a car accident, not the cancer, brought on his sudden death. Though his inner organs had cancer in advanced stages, none of the symptoms of the disease were apparent on the outside.

Having seen this for herself, her confidence swelled. She came to believe that one can live at peace with cancer by avoiding the wrong lifestyle.

Three causes

Both her husband and father died from cancer, and she recalled their living habits.

Her father was fat. He liked to eat meat, oily and fatty foods, garlic, chili peppers and sweets. He was a heavy drinker. He snored a lot when he slept, and never had colds. But his excessive eating and drinking had over time damaged his stomach and intestines. And because he ate too much, he was easily tired.

Her husband, on the other hand, was thin, neither drank nor smoked, and didn't like meat. He liked raw vegetables, cold water, and things that were salty, baked, boiled or sour. From time to time he had sore shoulders, and he was hard to rouse in the morning. He easily got colds, and had a body type that Chuang characterizes as suffering from nutritional imbalance.

Chuang was confused that her father and husband, with such different body types, both died from cancer. And so her research started from the basis of information about cancer patients' symptoms, body types, characters, diets and living habits. After compiling data from survey cards, she discovered places where her husband and father were quite similar.

She became convinced that long-term pickiness about food, poor living habits and inadequate dispelling of each day's fatigue were the major causes of cancer. A person's daily living habits and diet may weaken a person's physical make up, making it easy prey for cancer.

Running scared

What made her decide to fight?

In remembering the events of many decades ago, Dr. Chuang cannot but help sigh when she says, "Cancer has really done a number on me!"

Her father was a doctor of Chinese medicine. Starting as a young girl, she learned quite a lot about Chinese medicine and Chinese medical diagnoses from him. But she didn't expect he would come down with cancer of the rectum and die when she was 19.

Even more regrettably, six years later her husband would contract terminal lung cancer, leaving behind four children and another in the womb.

After that, she passed difficult days of raising five children with her poor mother.

With little pause, cancer had taken Chuang's two most beloved people. Seeing it as a foe for a lifetime, she hated the disease.

But in her heart she harbored a fear greater than this hatred--that her children had inherited a proclivity for cancer from their father and grandfather. She couldn't sit by and watch cancer cells attack her innocent children, and so she had no choice but declare war.

With her mother's encouragement and help, she got her qualifications as a Chinese medical doctor after studying Treatise on Fevers--all the while holding her crying children night after night.

A first for a Taiwanese woman

Afterwards, she expanded her father's "Guang Ho Tang" Chinese pharmacy into a clinic and also opened a radiation hospital that specialized in deep radiation for cancer patients.

Accumulating experience by working with more patients, her conviction that the roots of cancer we connected to body type grew more firm.

She thought that going to Japan to study Western medicine would broaden the horizons of her search. Yet her children were small. How could she leave them behind?

Providing encouragement when it was needed, her mother just said, "You've got to know when to pick things up and when to put them down!" And so Chuang closed her Taipei clinic, gave her mother charge of the four younger children, and took her eldest, a teenage girl, with her to Japan.

At the age of 36, she entered the medical school at Keio University without any previous academic degree, and began to work in anti-cancer research.

After eight years of diligent study, she finally earned the first MD granted by Keio University to a Taiwanese woman.

In the next decade, she didn't pass a day without thinking about how people got cancer or about the difficulties in fighting the disease. In 1966 she established the International Foundation for Research into Improving Constitutional Resistance to Cancer. As its director, she was constantly in touch with international scholars providing them with reports about how to use diet to prevent cancer and strengthen the body. When she was 46 she created the "Chinese Health Maintenance Method." which told people how to prevent cancer.

The Chinese Health Maintenance Method

The maxim "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" holds true for all diseases, and cancer is no exception. The most important two dictums of the Chinese Health Maintenance Method are these: eat normally and exercise appropriately.

The Chinese say "sickness comes in through the mouth." Food can both sustain and harm, and people need to know what foods are most appropriate to their own body types. From this understanding they can develop correct eating habits, but it requires careful attention.

"For breakfast eat well," a Chinese saying goes," for lunch eat until you're full, and at dinner eat little or nothing at all." These are the best guidelines for eating.

Bad food and drink turn things bad in the body. Body parts where things go wrong become susceptible to disease. And so if you want to get rid of the body's problems, you've first got to identify the causes and then stress correction.

Dr. Chuang believes that her "universal exercises for preventing cancer" not only prevent cancer but also promote growth in teenagers, reduce the effects of aging in the backs and legs of the elderly, and also lessen pain for cancer patients.

Modern people's lives are busy and tense, and they have a lot of pressure from work. Dr. Chuang believes that sleeping eight hours a day is not enough for the body to recover from a day's fatigue. In the universal exercises, one stretches the arms and legs and uses the tip of the fingers to stimulate the center of the palm. Forcefully pressing the toes against the ground can be used to stimulate the nerve endings and spur on the cranial nerves to adjust the balance between the body and the heart, reducing shoulder pain, eliminating nervous tension and curing sleeplessness.

But exactly how do the universal exercises for preventing cancer prevent cancer and make the body healthy? Dr. Chuang explains that these exercises stretch the body so as to stimulate the thyroid gland, exercise the lymph glands near the armpits and groin, stretch the diaphragm, normalize internal secretions, and raise the metabolism.

At the same time, the exercises for tightening the buttocks flex rarely exercised muscles, reducing excess skin and fat.

For those who already have cancer

In Japan Chuang Shu-chi met with success in her studies, and was lauded for her research. And so she began to feel that was time to return and make a contribution to her own country. Beginning in 1967, she has staged a series of anti-cancer activities in Taiwan: She's spread the word about how to fight cancer, going even to the villages; established cancer prevention groups; promoted cancer-prevention activities for everyone; held exhibits explaining the link between cancer and diet and lifestyle; and organized international cancer prevention societies.

To those people who already have cancer, Dr. Chuang suggests, "The most important thing is not to panic. You have got to hold fast to your will to fight, and you've got to have a determined winning attitude. Whatever you do, don't worry; and by all means maintain your emotional balance."

If a patient can put himself in the hands of a well-trained doctor and really listen to the doctor's instructions, then Chuang believes that the balancing of a patient's body functions through exercise combined with a real will to fight can beat this hard-to-cure disease.

For the vast majority of patients in the latter stages of cancer, these methods may not be able to save their lives, but they can reduce their pain and discomfort.

In 1970 Chuang once specially returned to Taiwan from Japan to serve as the chief doctor treating author and public servant Chiang Meng-lin for liver cancer. She was able to reduce much of his pain and extend his life so he could have his final wish of seeing the Shihmen Reservoir to completion.

Chiang Meng-lin was very grateful and left one third of his estate (NT$100,000) to Chuang to be used in researching cancer. And so Chuang decided to organize the "The Cancer Society of the ROC" to provide assistance to cancer patients in the fight against cancer.

On May 16 this year, as Chairwoman of the Ching Fong Foundation of Social Welfare, Taipei, Chuang went a step further by founding the International Family Cancer Prevention Foundatio, an extension of the Association of International Families to Prevent Cancer, Tokyo, which she established in Japan. In taking it international, she hopes to combine the power of even more families in the fight against cancer and allow them to provide mutual support. Future goals of the Family Cancer Prevention Society include helping care for cancer patients at home, teaching relatives how to provide this care themselves, and providing financial assistance.

In addition, she also wants to make use of this organization to collect materials related to cancer, providing the medical community with information to help with research and the public with reference materials about cancer prevention.

Chuang feels strongly that there is too little interchange between the Western and Eastern medical communities. Too many Eastern medical theories of value have been ignored or forgotten. And too many of the advances made by Western medicine in recent years have yet to be understood and adopted in the East. This is a very regrettable situation. She believes that Eastern and Western medical professionals ought to have a global approach, engaging in productive cooperation irrespective of region or nation.

This woman warrior's philosophy in fighting cancer takes as one of its guiding principles the Doctrine of the Mean, which has traditionally been given much weight by the Chinese. The healthy and the ill are both served by being reminded of its tenets.

Universal exercises for preventing cancerPreliminary exercises

1) Prepare a towel or strip of cloth about 150 cm (5 ft) long.

2) Hang the towel around your neck and stand barefoot with your back against a wall, with your heels, calves, buttocks, shoulders and head all touching the wall, your lower abdomen drawn in, your eyes looking ahead and upwards, your molars clenched firmly together, your tongue pressed against your palate and your lips tightly closed.

3) Stretch out both arms forcefully in front of you and clap your hands together above shoulder height, hard enough to feel the vibration in your shoulders. Then move your hands apart forcefully to bring the backs of your hands against the wall above shoulder height. Repeat eight times.

4) Remain in the position described in 2) and repeat the movements described in 3) eight times but with your palms facing upwards, and then eight times more with your palms facing outwards.

You are now ready to start the main exercises.

Universal Exercises

1) Stand with your feet should-width apart, relax your shoulders, concentrate your strength in your thighs and toes, and stretch up onto the balls of your feet.

2) Grip the towel and stretch both hands out in front of you at the same height as in the preliminary exercises.

3) Open your fists from around the towel so that it hangs across your thumbs.

4) Put your outstretched fingers together and rotate your hands inwards so that the towel runs around the backs of your hands and over your thumbs. Open your fingers, then stretch them out forcefully to stimulate the nerves in the ends of your fingers.

5) The towel is now across the palms of your hands. Forcefully stretch out your fingers and then clench your fists to stimulate the palms of your hands.

6) Turn both hands inwards and without bending your elbows, pull the towel straight to stimulate rarely-used muscles.

7) Gripping the towel, stretch both hands upwards and lean slightly backwards with your face turned upwards, your teeth clenched together and your lips tightly closed. This exercise stretches the diaphragm.

8) Lift up onto the balls of your feet and walk slowly forwards in a straight line, 10 to 50 paces each time.

The best time to do these exercises is half an hour before meals or an hour before bedtime.

(Chuang Ching-fen/tr. By Robert Taylor)