Chapter 174 Traditional Chinese Medicine Wins
The Grand Auditorium of the Beijing Hotel.
Today, the entire place was booked out. There was no banquet or awards ceremony; instead, a temporary medical station was set up, making the atmosphere resemble a public trial.
The room was packed with people. The first few rows were filled with renowned specialists and department heads from major hospitals in Beijing, all dressed in suits and ties, their expressions serious. The back rows were reporters from various newspapers, carrying their cameras and microphones.
A battle between traditional Chinese medicine and Western medicine, a life-or-death gamble!
This kind of news is so big it only happens once every eight hundred years; anyone who misses it will be scolded to death by the editor-in-chief when they get back.
In the very center of the first row, Liang Hongbo sat with his legs crossed, leading his team of prized students from Peking Union Medical College, his face etched with undisguised contempt.
He spoke in a low voice to a familiar director of the General Hospital of the People's Liberation Army, his voice neither too loud nor too soft, just loud enough for the people around him to hear.
"Old Liu, don't you think the world is getting more and more chaotic? Any Tom, Dick, or Harry dares to call themselves a miracle doctor and treat human lives like a joke. They're a disgrace to the medical community!"
Director Liu adjusted his glasses and chuckled dryly, "Professor Liang is right. But Bai Shu, after all, was brought by Elder Chen, and has the Lu family backing him..."
"What happened to the Lu family?" Liang Hongbo sneered.
"Can the Lu family really protect a charlatan and risk the lives of a meritorious family member? I'm telling you right now, science is science, and there's no room for deception! If she can't be cured, I'll be the first to report it and have her arrested!"
His words resonated deeply, drawing nods of agreement from many of his Western medicine colleagues around him. When they looked at the empty hospital bed on the stage, their eyes were filled with schadenfreude, as if they were watching a good show.
Just then, the side door of the auditorium opened, and two caregivers in white coats carried a person slowly in on a stretcher.
The murmurs in the room fell silent instantly.
All eyes were focused on the stretcher.
The person on the stretcher was less a human and more a skeleton in human skin. All the muscles in his body had atrophied, the skin clung loosely to the bones, his eye sockets were sunken, and his cheekbones were high. Only the slight rise and fall of his chest proved that he was still alive.
An atmosphere of despair and death filled the entire auditorium as the stretcher moved.
"Heavens...is this Madam Zhang's illness?"
"I had only seen it in the medical records before, but I didn't expect it to be even more... scary in person than in the photos."
"How can this be treated? The muscles are all necrotic; even a miracle worker couldn't help!"
The doctors below, both Chinese and Western, shook their heads upon seeing the case. This kind of case was beyond the scope of modern medicine's understanding; let alone curing it, it would be a miracle if she could even live one more day.
Liang Hongbo's sarcasm deepened.
He stood up, deliberately raised his voice, and said to the entire audience: "Fellow colleagues, fellow journalists! Look! This is the patient that some people have touted as being cured by 'folk remedies'!"
“I, Liang Hongbo, am making this clear right here: if any ‘miracle doctor’ can cure this kind of patient with a few needle pricks and a few bowls of herbal root and tree bark soup, I will immediately become her apprentice and retire from the medical field!”
His words drew cheers from the team members.
Almost everyone was convinced that the young woman named Bai Shu was doomed to lose today, and that she would lose badly.
Amidst this oppressive and noisy atmosphere, Bai Shu stepped onto the stage.
She wasn't wearing a white lab coat, just a simple plain-colored long dress, her long hair loosely tied back, and her face without makeup, yet she was more eye-catching than any of the meticulously dressed women present.
She walked onto the stage, ignoring the surrounding discussions and scrutiny, and calmly went to the patient's side, reached out, and took his pulse.
For the next six days, the entire medical and media community in Beijing was caught in a bizarre cycle.
Every morning at 10 o'clock, a "treatment" that everyone sees as perfunctory is staged in the auditorium of the Beijing Hotel.
Atractylodes macrocephala does only two things every day.
The first step was acupuncture. She used very fine and long silver needles, taking only three to five at a time, inserting them into acupoints on the patient's body that no one could understand, twisting them a few times, and removing them after half an hour.
The second thing was feeding the patient medicine. Every day, she would personally bring a bowl of dark, murky herbal soup. The medicine had an extremely strange smell, like Chinese medicine, but with an indescribable, exotic fragrance. She would pry open the patient's mouth with her own hands and carefully feed them spoonful by spoonful.
After doing these two things, she left, leaving the patient to rest on the table.
That's all.
It's that simple.
It's so simple it's perfunctory, so perfunctory it's laughable.
Liang Hongbo's team openly mocks him from the audience every day.
"See that? It's the same old tricks again, all that superstition and nonsense!"
"I smelled that herbal medicine; it smells like rotten leaves. Could it cause health problems?"
"Teacher, I think she's just stalling for time. Once the seventh day is up, she'll find an excuse to run away!"
Liang Hongbo sat in the front row every day, his face growing increasingly impatient. He even started contacting his friends in the police force, preparing to arrest the man on charges of "practicing medicine without a license" as soon as the seventh day ended.
However, those astute reporters noticed something amiss when comparing the photos they took every day.
"Hey, Lao Wang, look, this is the first day's photo. Madam Zhang's face was deathly pale. But in today's photo, it seems... it seems like she has some color in her face?"
"You feel that way too? I thought I was seeing things! Look at her lips, they used to be dark, and although they're still chapped, they're not as scary anymore."
“Breathing… Listen to her breathing, isn’t it stronger than it was a few days ago?”
These subtle changes may not be obvious to ordinary people, but to these reporters who are watching closely every day, they have become signs of an impending storm.
Day 7.
The agreed-upon deadline.
There were even more people in the auditorium than on the first day; the aisles were packed, and the atmosphere was so tense it felt like a string that could snap at any moment.
Bai Shu remained calm and composed, taking the stage on time.
She came to the patient's bedside and, under the watchful eyes of everyone, removed the last silver needle from the patient's head.
Then, she straightened up, reached out to the patient who hadn't moved an inch in the past seven days except for breathing, and said in a calm, almost commanding tone the words that instantly caused an uproar in the room.
"Get up and get down yourself."
boom!
The entire auditorium felt like it had been hit by a bomb!
"Are you crazy?!"
"What did she say? That she would make someone with necrosis of all their muscles walk down on their own?"
"Is this an insult to our intelligence?!"
Liang Hongbo jumped up from his chair, pointed at Bai Shu on the stage, his face flushed with anger, and roared:
"Absurd! Utter nonsense! Do you think this is a myth? Guards! Bring this charlatan to me..."
His words came to an abrupt end.
Because, under everyone's incredulous gaze, the patient, who had been determined to be unable to move even a single finger, had his right hand, as thin as a chicken claw, tremble slightly in the index finger.
one time.
Another one.
The entire auditorium fell into a deathly silence.
Everyone stared wide-eyed, held their breath, and intently watched the trembling finger.
Then, that hand slowly and miraculously braced itself against the edge of the bed.
The patient used all his strength, the veins on his arms bulging, and with an extremely slow but incredibly firm motion, he sat up from the bed!
"Oh My God……"
"Sit...sit up..."
A suppressed gasp broke the silence.
The next second, the entire audience erupted in uproar!
The patient sat on the edge of the bed, two streams of hot tears gushing from her cloudy eyes. She looked at the shocked and distorted faces below the stage, then looked up at the calm young girl in front of her, her lips trembling, but she couldn't utter a sound.
Bai Shu smiled slightly at her, reached out her hand again, and said in a gentle, encouraging voice, "Don't be afraid, step on the ground and stand up."
The patient nodded, tears streaming down his face.
She trembled as she lowered her feet off the bed and onto the cold floor.
Those legs were as thin as two hemp stalks, as if a gust of wind could break them.
Everyone in the audience held their breath.
Encouraged by Bai Shu, she braced herself on the bed with both hands, trying little by little to transfer the weight of her entire body to her legs, which had atrophied for three years.
"Stop! Stop!" a young reporter couldn't help but shout.
Amidst the gasps of hundreds of people in the room, Madam Zhang was no longer supported by the bedside.
She stood up on her own!
Although she was swaying and her legs were shaking like leaves in the autumn wind, she truly stood still!
Miracle!
A real-life medical miracle that happened right before everyone's eyes!
"Snap! Snap! Snap!"
At that moment, the flashes went off like crazy, illuminating the entire auditorium as if it were daytime!
Reporters rushed toward the podium like madmen, handing out microphones as if they were free, and bombarding Bai Shu with questions like a machine gun.
"Miss Baizhu! May I ask what treatment you are using?"
"Is this a miracle of traditional Chinese medicine? Can you explain the underlying principles?"
"You've made history! Do you have anything to say?"
In the first row, Liang Hongbo, who had just been shouting that he would arrest people, was now ashen-faced, as if all his strength had been drained. With a "thud," he slumped into his chair.
He stared intently at the lone figure standing on the stage, his eyes vacant, his mouth repeating only a few words over and over again.
"Impossible...this is not scientific..."
"This is absolutely impossible..."
He lost.
In front of the entire medical and media community of Beijing, they suffered a crushing defeat, utterly humiliated.
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