Believe in your body's ability to heal itself, part 1

We are going to be translating and blogging sections of a book by Dr. Guo de fu that talks about self healing. This is the first section, it is just a fragment. It is the the author's note. TCM is for Traditional Chinese Medicine. This is written in first person, being told from Dr. Guo's point of view.

"TCM has no end, you will never be too old to keep learning it."

In 1960, I started teaching myself TCM, then observed Dr. Fang Ding Ru in his clinic. At the time, Mr. Fang was already 83. He was one of Wenzhou’s famous well-respected elderly TCM doctor. After, I learned from Mr. Hu Tian You and Mr. Gu zheng sheng. Mr. Hu was well-known in Yong Jia. Mr. Gu was a TCM professor at Wenzhou Medical School. When I studied with them I was already 45 years old. All the other students were all young men. They all called me “older brother.” I felt proud.
TCM has been regarded by some as a treasure, while others think it is not based on science. Some think it is awesome, some think it is nothing. We are all Chinese people, all the descendents of Yan and Huang emperors, but the difference in thinking is unbelievable!
I think because less experienced doctors often haven’t seen it all, so they prescribe treatments that are not very effective. This in turn makes TCM not as reliable as it should be.
The study of TCM is vast, so vast that even in your lifetime you could not learn everything. This makes even the most experienced of doctors limited in what they know. After all these years of studying, I am documenting everything I’ve learnt, heard, seen, experienced, for future generations. I am only going to write down the things I know. There is probably much more that I don’t know. I always tell my students that once they start learning TCM, they better be prepared to study it for their whole life as there is so much to it. My point is, TCM is so vast that you must learn until you are old, and even then if you are still learning it is not an embarrassment. The goal of studying medicine is to keep people alive longer, not to make money.
The main ideas that I learned from my teachers are the ways of treating patients and the morals that go with them. These cannot be separated.
If I see one of my students neglecting a patient because they cannot pay, I feel that I have been a bad teacher. In fact, since the beginning of TCM, the goal of being a doctor is to heal the sick and only help the sick, not to make money. The traditional saying about this is that if you don’t have 100 acres of land; don’t even think about becoming a doctor. If you had so much land, you would not care about the money, only about helping people.