Last January, a little Chinese boy, Dongdong, lost his battle against Thalassemia and passed away. What saddens his parents most is that the illness did not cause his death, but the treatment.
It all started when Dongdong’s mom spotted an online advertisement on the official website of a Guangzhou hospital, which proclaimed a 93 per cent success rate for marrow transplant operations done by Doctor Zhu, a senior pediatrician at the hospital.
She applied.
Prior to and after the operation, Doctor Zhu urged her to purchase an important super drug from a man surnamed Wang, priced at massive 4500 yuans a dose. Shortly after taking the drug, the boy developed complications – he began vomiting and urinating blood up to 40 times a day, which eventually killed him.
Dongdong is not alone. Between July 2004 and September 2005, Doctor Zhu performed marrow transplant on 15 children, from which he pocketed 4000 yuans of gift cashes from the parents, not counting the commissions he got from that fake drug smuggler Wang.
It is up to his young patients and their families to bear the grave consequences of his cold-blooded acts. Some families have to sell their property or run into huge debts to pay the medical bills that amount to as much as 900,000 yuan. But this is nothing compared to the young lives lost. Of his 15 patients, 9 died, thanks to his fake super drug.
Yet this is not an isolated case.
Some medical practitioners, particularly those dominant Western Medicine heavyweights, are viewed by the Chinese as one of the most corrupt groups in today’s China – just a little behind the property developers – and cash for prescription practice is common. A few years back, during the SARS crisis, they were called White Angels; now they’re more frequently referred to as White Snakes.
Early this year, when China’s Health Ministry finally decided to take action, 200 million yuan of drug commission was forced to hand over. But this is believed to be only the tip of the iceberg.
Yet the greed demonstrated by some of them is just boundless. In order to achieve a total dominance of the market, they keep lobbying for eliminating the cost-effective Chinese Medicine that Chinese people have relied on for health care for thousands of years. In a recent farcical petition, an America-based Western Medicine doctor calls for the exclusion of Chinese Medicine from the national health care system, and the majority of the signature bearers, as it is disclosed, are Western Medicine practitioners.
Edited on May 14, 2025