Master of Traditional Chinese Medicine: Li Yuqi

Li Yuqi, a male, of Han nationality, born in August 1917, is the chief physician of the Affiliated Hospital of Liaoning University of Traditional Chinese Medicine. He has been practicing Chinese medicine since March 1939 and is the instructor of the inheritance work of the national old Chinese medicine experts.

He proposed “treating atrophic gastritis with canker sores”, breaking the saying that gastric cancer is irreversible.

He is known as a “modern-day Pianque” for his dedication to studying tongue signs and his tongue diagnosis is a masterpiece.

In Hubei, he was welcomed by the public, and patients lined up to see him with their bedding and dry food.

In the studio of the famous old Chinese medicine doctor in the outpatient building of the Liaoning University Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Li Yuqi, a 92-year-old master of Chinese medicine, is wearing a Chinese lapel top, with a straight back and has eyes. “I have lived for almost a century and dedicated my whole life to TCM, and I have witnessed the development of TCM in the past century. All I do is to do my best to treat patients, teach future generations, and pass on the national essence of Chinese medicine.”

Scrupulously abide by the medical ethics, hanging pots to help the world and solve the suffering of the people

In 1993, the old man Li Yuqi took a hard train for 2 days, rushed to Hubei Puqi, thousands of miles away from the clinic, welcome the villagers stood full of bales, patients carrying bunks, with dry food queue to see the doctor, only a month to treat thousands of patients, did not charge the public a registration fee.

In 1917, Li Yuqi was born in Yinzhou, Liaoning Province (now Tieling). He was gifted and well-read in poetry, and he won the countryside examinations. In 1932, he entered the Yinzhou School of Chinese and Western Medicine and studied with three famous Yinzhou doctors, Xingxing Yuan, Ding Yiqing and Jiang Bichen, as his teachers. In 1939, Li Yuqi graduated from the school and stayed on as a teacher, and at the age of 22, he took the podium to teach students the “Wenzhi Jiaozhi”. During this period, he continued to study the Nei Jing and Typhoid under three teachers and learned clinical skills.

In 1947, Li Yuqi was elected as the president of the Federation of Chinese and Western Medicine Teachers in Xi’an County, Fengtian Province (now Liaoyuan City, Jilin Province) for his excellent medical skills and good medical ethics.

After the founding of New China, the government strengthened the training of Chinese medicine teachers and held a teacher training class at the Beijing Chinese Medicine Training School in 1952. Li Yuqi and a group of later famous doctors such as Lu Zhizheng entered the teacher training class and received a certificate of qualification as a Chinese medicine practitioner issued by the Ministry of Health of the Central People’s Government after graduation.

Thereafter, Li Yuqi served as the vice principal of Liaodong Provincial TCM Training School, the first director of the TCM Department of Liaoning Provincial Health Department, and single-handedly established Liaoning College of TCM and its affiliated hospitals. For more than 60 years, he has been practicing medicine, always adhering to the medical ethics of “medicine is benevolent art”, and taking it as his duty to help the world and relieve the suffering of patients, regardless of the nobility and the loss. The old man used to say: “Practice the way of medicine, but never do medical business.”

With so many years of medical experience, the most memorable trip to Hubei in 1993 is the one that Li Yuqi remembers most.

In the early 1990s, farmers from Puqi (now Chibi) in Hubei often traveled thousands of miles to Shenyang to see Li Yuqi for stomach problems. Every year, hundreds of patients came. During his conversations with the patients, Li Yuqi learned that there were many local farmers suffering from gastric diseases, and he felt very uncomfortable looking at the farmers who rushed to seek medical treatment. After contacting the relevant departments, Li Yuqi decided to go to Hubei for medical treatment. At that time, he could not buy a sleeper ticket, so Li Yuqi, who was already 76 years old, took a hard seat and traveled for 2 days to Puqi, Hubei, which is thousands of miles away.

The news of Li Yuqi’s visit had already spread to all the villages, and the villagers stood in the hills to welcome him. Patients from all over the countryside came early to line up with their bedding and dry food, and the line was several miles long in just one or two days. Seeing such a scene, Li Yuqi was so excited that, despite the tiring journey, he began to treat patients immediately after arriving, seeing more than a hundred people from morning to night every day, sometimes not even caring to eat. Later, even patients from Hankow and Changsha came to seek medical treatment. In Puqi for more than a month, Li Yuqi treated thousands of people, not only did not receive a penny of registration fee, but also refused the 3000 yuan reward given by the local hospital. To show their gratitude, the villagers sent piles and piles of freshly picked rhizomes.

It is better to give people fish than to teach them to fish. In the process of diagnosis, Li Yuqi continuously summarized and gave lessons to his disciples, and selflessly taught his experience in treating spleen and stomach diseases combined with the characteristics of local diseases to the doctors in Puqi. Today, the local treatment of spleen and stomach diseases has reached a high level, making it possible for many patients to get good treatment at their doorstep without the hardships of traveling and horses.

Such things as this for the people to solve the difficulties in Li Yuqi’s medical career is common. And his prescriptions are less precise and cheaper, generally seven or eight yuan per serving. Once a rural woman with a high fever daughter to Shenyang to see a doctor, in the major general hospitals, for several days almost all the money spent on the body, the child’s fever did not go down, after the introduction of people to find Li Yuqi.

After diagnosis, Li Yuqi wrote a prescription of only 5 Chinese herbs. The woman grabbed the medicine for her child under the belief, and did not expect the child’s temperature to drop to 38℃ the next day, and to 36.7℃ on the third day. “A few dozen dollars cured a disease that western doctors had not cured for thousands of dollars!”

Over the years, he has refused to accept the money and goods sent by patients have lost count of how many, in the case of poor patients not only do not receive a penny, but also often help, the trust and admiration of patients. There are many patients from home and abroad who come to him, and they often need to wait in line for several days in advance to register in order to be treated by him. Although he is old, he still insists on going to the clinic many times with illness and often works overtime.

Li Yuqi has been practicing medicine for more than 60 years, inheriting the art of Qihuang and promoting the essence of national medicine. He is aware of the endless sea of learning, medical skills, although there has been into, still tirelessly study the true meaning of the medical scriptures, and learn from the past and present, in the case of disease and chronic diseases, the evidence of medicine has worked wonders, with high medical ethics and exquisite medical skills to save tens of thousands of patients, known as the “northern apricot forest, Liaoshen pillar of Chinese medicine”, repeatedly awarded by the Ministry of Health He has been awarded “civilized worker” and “medical worker with high medical ethics” by the Ministry of Health. The Liaoning Daily reported Li’s noble medical virtues on the front page with the title of “Poverty and Guardianship for the Benefit of the World”.

Researching the spleen and stomach, he has become a master of tongue diagnosis.

It is proved that the treatment of atrophic gastritis with canker sores has resulted in 72.3% recovery of pathology, which has achieved the expected good effect and laid a good foundation for further research on blocking cancer, and has broken the western medical belief that gastric cancer is irreversible.

Li Yuqi is an expert in internal medicine, especially in the study of spleen and stomach diseases for more than 30 years, and has presided over the national “Sixth Five-Year Plan”, “Seventh Five-Year Plan” and “Eighth Five-Year Plan” research projects, and developed Stomach Fu He has developed new drugs of three categories, such as Stomach Fu Punch and Nourishing Yin Stomach Punch, which are unique in the field of spleen and stomach diseases in Chinese medicine and enjoy a high reputation.

He has been a pioneer in the field of spleen and stomach diseases and has gained a high reputation. After more than ten years of research on atrophic gastritis and gastric precancerous lesions, he has accumulated rich clinical experience, and combined the ancient medical treatises such as Huang Di Nei Jing and Sheng Ji Zong Lu with modern medical tests to understand the disease, and was the first in China to propose the famous “atrophic gastritis treated by carbuncle”.

According to Li Yuqi, gastric carbuncle is a disease in which the gastric yang is suppressed because it cannot be propagated. The suppression of gastric yang can also be regarded as the superficial evidence of gastric atrophy, i.e., cold qi separating yang.

The so-called internal evidence of the stomach is heat gathering in the stomach. Therefore, the treatment of atrophic gastritis is not based on “gastric gangrene”, “stomach pain”, or “nine heart pains”, but on the interplay of cold and heat induced by both the spleen and stomach. It can be seen that deficiency cold leads to distention and vomiting, while actual heat leads to burning discomfort in the stomach and epigastrium, and stasis of blood leads to vomiting and blood in the stool.

Modern medical tests prove that the development of atrophic gastritis is also a process from quantitative to qualitative changes, which is consistent with the formation of canker sores due to cold and unpreparedness, poor diet, strain on the stomach, depression and injury to the spleen, and the accumulation of stasis for a long time, which turns into decay and decay into canker sores. This viewpoint provided a new way of thinking for the identification of evidence in Chinese medicine and produced a great response in the academic community of Chinese medicine.

Under the guidance of this academic idea, Li Yuqi classified the etiology of atrophic gastritis and divided the evolution of the disease into three stages: the early stage is treated by pacifying the liver and stomach and regulating the spleen; the middle stage is treated by benefiting the stomach and nourishing yin, eliminating carbuncles and dispersing knots; the middle and late stage is treated by eliminating carbuncles and stasis, removing decay and creating new ones.

It has been proved that atrophic gastritis treated with carbuncle has resulted in 72.3% pathological recovery and received the expected good effect, which has laid a good foundation for further research on blocking carcinogenesis and has broken the western medical belief that gastric cancer is irreversible.

Li Yuqi has presided over a number of research projects of the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Science and Technology, and formed a research group on gastritis, which has provided new insights into the etiological classification of the development of atrophic gastritis and the evolutionary staging of the disease, and summarized the Chinese medicine evidence-based treatment system for atrophic gastritis. He has developed Gastroflux Punch and Nourishing Yin Stomach Punch, which have become one of the few Class III new drugs for the treatment of atrophic gastritis in China and are listed in the “National Chinese Medicine Protection Varieties”, creating huge social and economic benefits.

The far-reaching significance of Li Yuqi’s doctrine of “atrophic gastritis treated by canker sores” to the medical community goes far beyond this. Australian scientists Barry Marshall and Robin Warren discovered Helicobacter pylori in the 1980s and suggested that it was the cause of chronic gastritis, which caused a great deal of reaction in the world medical community.

They were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2005 because their discovery provided a new basis for the treatment of chronic gastritis and made a major step forward in medicine. In fact, decades ago, Li had cured thousands of patients with the disease by applying the method of clearing heat and detoxification, removing decay and eliminating carbuncles. The method of clearing heat and detoxifying the canker sores has included the modern medical meaning of antibacterial and anti-inflammatory.

As the saying goes, “Different paths lead to the same end, different methods lead to the same formula, and the thinking of Chinese medicine can also be ahead of modern technology, which is a kind of materialistic, dialectical, scientific thinking with nature. With advanced thinking as a guide and a willingness to conduct in-depth research and exploration, Chinese medicine can also develop and leap forward.

During his many years of clinical work, Li Yuqi devoted himself to the study of tongue signs and made discoveries and creations in tongue diagnosis. He was able to determine the presence of an occupying lesion in a patient’s body by virtue of the combined tongue and pulse.

According to Li Yuqi, when there is an occupying lesion in the patient’s body, the tongue image shows no spirit and no root, and the pulse image shows Li’s rejection phenomenon.

He thus enriched the content of Chinese medicine tongue diagnosis by proposing the diagnostic techniques of “tongue diagnosis” and “rejection of pulse”, and made significant progress in tongue diagnosis, which became “the best in the medical world”. He is known as a “contemporary magpie” in the medical field.