Why Should You Quit Smoking?

I have a cousin who studied medicine. More precisely, he specializes in radiology. He spends his days in a dark room examining scans—CTs, MRIs, and images of all kinds of human tissue.

One year, when he came home for the Spring Festival, I casually asked him over dinner what he had been busy with lately.

“Nothing much,” he said. “I’ve just looked at several thousand lung CT scans.”

“What did you learn from them?” I asked.

With a solemn expression, he replied, “Bro, take my advice: quit smoking as soon as you can.”

“Why?”

“There’s an unwritten rule in our department: no one who works in our field smokes.”

“Why is that?”

“Because we’ve seen more ‘evil’ than anyone else.”

On a CT scan, a healthy lung looks fresh and clean, like a newly washed sponge. But the lungs of someone who has smoked for ten or twenty years—even if they have not yet become cancerous—are an utter mess. The scans are covered with spots, nodules, and streak-like shadows, like a filthy rag battered over and over again by ash and tar.

He took a sip of tea and continued.

“But that isn’t the most frightening part. The most frightening part is that the person has no idea. He may think he’s in excellent health—eating well, drinking well, running, jumping—but he doesn’t know that his lungs are already riddled with damage, one step away from the edge of a cliff.

“Our job every day is to pick these scans out from piles of people who ‘look healthy’ and write reports for the clinicians. We’re like judges in hell, stamping verdicts all day long: suspected; highly suspicious; next one, essentially confirmed. After you’ve stamped enough of them, you go numb. You lose all illusions about life.”

He looked at me and said, “Bro, do you know what ‘violence’ is? Smoking is a form of violence.

“You think you’re merely lighting a cigarette. You’re not. You’re using nicotine, tar, and all those other substances to subject the softest, most innocent organs in your body to a decade—or several decades—of relentless domestic violence.

“Your lungs cannot speak. They cannot fight back. They can only suffer in silence. Until one day, when they can take no more, they retaliate with cancer. By then, no matter how desperately you cry or how much money you spend, it will be too late.”

I did not sleep at all that night.

The word “violence” lodged itself in my mind like a needle.

I have always had a crude, instinctive, almost cheap resentment toward medicine.

Why?

Because throughout my life, I have always seen hospitals as repair shops.

Your body is a machine. When something breaks, you go to the hospital. And doctors? They are the mechanics.

You have a headache, so they prescribe headache medicine. Your stomach hurts, so they give you medicine for your stomach. When a part is damaged beyond repair, they cut it out and replace it.

The entire process feels cold and mechanical, built around confrontation.

You are pitted against the disease.
The doctor is pitted against the disease.
Treatment is a war in which drugs and surgery become “weapons” used to attack and destroy the “enemy” inside the body.

This is what we are taught from childhood: when you get sick, take medicine; when you catch a cold, get an injection.

We entrust our recovery entirely to external forces.

What kind of mental model is this?

It is a model of outsourcing.

We outsource all responsibility for our health to doctors and medication. We stay up late, drink excessively, overeat, and sit still all day without a second thought. We abuse our bodies in every imaginable way while telling ourselves:

It’s fine. Hospitals exist, after all. Medical technology is so advanced these days.

It is like a spoiled heir who squanders money and causes trouble every day while thinking:

It’s fine. My father is rich. He’ll clean up my mess.

The hospital is that “father.”

Our dependence on medicine comes precisely from our extreme unwillingness to take responsibility for our own health.

So why did I resent it?

Because this “father” is too expensive, too cold, and too unreliable.

Have you ever done the math?

Of all the money a person spends on healthcare between birth and death, more than 80 percent is spent during the final six months of life.

What a terrifying figure.

It means that we use a lifetime of savings to purchase a few final months of lingering existence.

In the ICU, tubes are inserted all over our bodies. There is no dignity and no quality of life—only the effort to maintain an indicator called “alive.”

Life becomes a string of numbers: blood pressure, heart rate, blood oxygen saturation…

And for the sake of those numbers, we spare no expense.

We celebrate every advance in medicine. We rejoice whenever another incurable disease is conquered.

But we rarely ask the most fundamental question:

Why do we wait until we are sick before seeking treatment?
Why can’t we avoid becoming sick in the first place?

Modern medicine is, in essence, a science of disease—not a science of health.

Its entire system is built around the question of how to fight disease. Our research into disease has reached the molecular and genetic levels, while our understanding of health remains stuck at the primitive stage of “drink more hot water.”

Isn’t that absurd?

I began to reflect on a question:

What is true health?

I have a friend whom we call Lao Dao. He is nearly sixty and has practiced traditional Chinese medicine for many years.

He does not resemble the ethereal, sage-like figure people often imagine. Instead, he looks like the friendly uncle next door and is cheerful every day.

His clinic feels more like a tearoom than a medical office. There is no pungent smell of disinfectant—only the faint fragrance of tea and medicinal herbs.

People constantly come to see him, but he has a rule: he only receives patients in the morning. In the afternoon, he closes the clinic, drinks tea, reads, and practices calligraphy.

“People live on ordinary food,” he said. “How could anyone never get sick? But illness comes in two forms.

“The first is ‘substantial illness.’ This is when the body—the machine—has developed a genuine structural problem. Perhaps you have broken your leg, or a tumor has grown very large. For illnesses like these, you need Western medicine: surgery and powerful drugs. This is a decisive battle, and you must act quickly, accurately, and forcefully.

“The other kind is ‘functional illness.’ None of the body’s parts are broken, but the system as a whole has fallen out of coordination. It is like a computer whose hardware is perfectly fine, but whose system has been infected by a virus, slowed down, or repeatedly crashed by conflicting software.”

According to him, most of the problems people suffer from today belong to this second category.

What does “functional illness” mean?

Anxiety, insomnia, obesity, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high cholesterol, and various forms of chronic inflammation…

These are not necessarily substantial lesions in a particular organ. They are manifestations of an imbalance in the body as a whole.

“The wisdom of traditional Chinese medicine,” he said, “does not lie in treating disease. It lies in treating disease before it arises.”

I had heard the phrase “treating disease before it arises” countless times, but it was not until that day that I felt I had begun to understand it.

What does it actually mean?

It does not mean predicting which disease you will develop in the future and taking medicine in advance. That would be fortune-telling, not medicine.

To truly “treat disease before it arises” is to adjust your present state.

Lao Dao offered an analogy.

“What allows a country to enjoy lasting peace and stability?” he asked. “Does it depend on fighting wars every day? No. It depends on honest and effective governance, favorable conditions, and people living and working in peace. The entire social system must remain harmonious and balanced.

“The body, too, is a small universe—a country. The internal organs are its civil and military officials. The meridians, qi, and blood are its roads and transportation networks.

“A good practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine is not a general who spends every day thinking about fighting wars and suppressing bandits. He should be a chancellor—a manager.

“His job is to coordinate the relationships between different departments, ensure that the government’s orders flow smoothly, and make sure the country’s resources—its qi and blood—can reach every place where they are needed.

“Once the system becomes harmonious, the ‘rebels and traitors’—the diseases—naturally lose the conditions they need to survive.”

He said that Western medicine looks at the disease, while traditional Chinese medicine looks at the pattern.

The difference is only one word, yet the two concepts are worlds apart.

A disease is a result—a label such as “hypertension” or “diabetes.”

A pattern is a state and a process, such as “stagnation of liver qi” or “deficiency and cold in the spleen and stomach.”

The logic of Western medicine is:

You have high blood pressure, so I will prescribe antihypertensive medication to bring that number down.

It targets the result.

The logic of traditional Chinese medicine is:

Why is your blood pressure high? Perhaps you have been angry all the time lately, causing excessive liver fire to drive your blood pressure upward. In that case, I will help soothe the liver and regulate qi.

Or perhaps your diet has been too rich and greasy, and your spleen and stomach cannot process it properly. This has produced phlegm and dampness, obstructing your blood vessels. In that case, I will strengthen the spleen and dispel dampness.

It targets the cause—the underlying state.

“Look,” Lao Dao said, “two people may both have high blood pressure, yet the causes behind it can be completely different. Their treatment should therefore be completely different as well.

“If you do not know how to distinguish the underlying patterns and do nothing but lower the blood pressure, you are treating the symptoms rather than the root cause. You have merely switched off the fire alarm while the fire continues to burn.”

I was dumbfounded.

It completely overturned my understanding of medicine.

I had always thought that traditional Chinese medicine was simply about drinking herbal decoctions and accepting slow treatment. Only then did I understand that behind it lies an entirely different worldview.

The worldview of Western medicine is based on confrontation and mechanism. It sees the human being as a machine and disease as an enemy.

The worldview of traditional Chinese medicine is based on systems and balance. It sees the human being as an ecosystem and health as a dynamic equilibrium.

My cousin in radiology saw the consequences of the “evil.” That frightened him, so he quit smoking.

This reflects the logic of Western medicine: knowing what is so—seeing how terrifying the outcome can be.

Lao Dao’s approach reflects the logic of traditional Chinese medicine: knowing why it is so—investigating how the “evil” arises and how it can be prevented at the source.

Neither way of thinking is inherently superior to the other. But when it comes to guiding the way we live, they are fundamentally different.

One is fear-driven and points toward the final outcome.
The other is wisdom-driven and focuses on the process.

I have spent years thinking about this.

I have come to realize that much of our suffering originates from a “repairman mentality.”

When a marriage develops problems, we think about how to “repair” the other person instead of examining what has gone wrong with the marital system itself.

When problems arise in a child’s education, we think about how to “fix” the child’s bad habits instead of asking whether something is wrong with the family ecosystem.

When we hit a bottleneck at work, we think about how to “repair” our weaknesses instead of considering whether we are truly compatible with the workplace system as a whole.

We are always waiting for problems to occur and then trying to “repair” them.

We treat the head when the head hurts and the foot when the foot hurts. We rush from crisis to crisis, perpetually exhausted, yet we can never escape the cycle.

Why?

Because we lack systems thinking and the wisdom of “treating disease before it arises.”

We cannot see the universal connections between things. We cannot see the enormous structure beneath the surface—the rest of the iceberg.

We remain on the surface of the sea, futilely scooping up the garbage that keeps floating into view, never once considering that a vast hole may already have opened in the bottom of the ship…