Exclusive interview with academician Fan Daiming: Holistic Integrative Medicine and a new era of healthcare

Interviewee Biography: Fan Daiming is an Academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and an international member of the National Academy of Medicine (United States), the French National Academy of Medicine, and the Brazilian National Academy of Medicine. He currently serves as President of the China Anti-Cancer Association, President of the Asian Oncology Society, President of the World Association for Integrative Oncology, President of the International Association for Holistic Integrative Medicine, and Honorary President of the World Federation for Integrative Health. He is also Director of the State Key Laboratory of Holistic Integrative Management of Gastrointestinal Cancer, Director of the National Clinical Research Centre for Digestive Diseases, and Chair of the Academic Committee of the China Institute for Development Strategy of Holistic Integrative Medicine. He formerly served as Vice President of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and President of the Fourth Military Medical University. He has been honoured as a national-level Outstanding Communist Party Member, Outstanding Science and Technology Worker and Advanced Individual in National Scientific Literacy Promotion, and has led numerous major national research programmes, including projects under China's "973" and "863" initiatives. As the principal awardee, he has received the National Science and Technology Progress Award for Innovation Teams and the First-Class National Science and Technology Progress Award. His honours include Master of the World Gastroenterology Organisation (WGO), Master of the Asian Pacific Association of Gastroenterology (APAGE), the American Sackler Physician of the Year Award (1990), the Sevia Award of the French Academy of Medicine, and the Ho Leung Ho Lee Prize for Scientific and Technological Progress. He has edited more than 200 monographs and published over 800 papers indexed in the Science Citation Index (SCI). He also serves as Editor-in-Chief of the China Anti-Cancer Association (CACA) Guidelines for Holistic Integrative Management of Cancer.

Editor's Note: At a time when medical subspecialties continue to fragment ever more deeply and technology evolves at a dizzying pace, is medicine losing its capacity to "see the patient"? With this question, Cure & Care – a journal devoted to integrative medicine, the convergence of cure and care, and holistic medical approaches – conducted an in-depth interview with Academician Fan Daiming.

Cure & Care: Dear Academician Fan, in recognition of your eminent standing and far-reaching influence in the field of "Holistic Integrative Medicine", It is a greatest honour for us, Cure & Care, that you allow us for this to this exclusive interview. Cure & Care is an international peer-reviewed journal that upholds the WHO's holistic definition of health – encompassing physical, psychological and social well-being. Our journal comprises the three principals: "Cure" (for medical research and treatment), "Care" (for nursing research and practice) and "Cure and Care" for holistic health (an integrated interdisciplinary healthcare). Our mission is to advance global academic exchanges and the dissemination of frontier knowledge in healthcare and medicine. The philosophy of Holistic Integrative Medicine that you champion for resonates profoundly with our editorial mission of dissolving the boundary between treatment and care and promoting multidisciplinary collaborations. We hope this interview would allow us to present your pioneering thoughts to a global readership, and we look forward to bring your deep and intellectual insights into our journal.

I. Interrogating the Essence of Medicine

Cure & Care: You have practised medicine for almost five decades and have long grappled with the question, "What is medicine?" Would you tell us your answer to it?

Fan Daiming: I have pondered this question for almost fifty years. Many people claim that medicine is a science, however, I firmly disagree. Medicine and science are more like two trains running on separate tracks - they differ in gauge, materials, propulsion and speed. Neither can encompass the other, nor can one substitute for the other. Their paths intersect at certain points, but beyond that junction, each must continue along its own journey. Ultimately, however, they share a common destination: serving the interests of human beings.

Science is concerned with data, models and reproducibility – all of which matter to medicine, but are far from sufficient. The human body is a black box composed of far more than trillions of cells, in which even a minor stimulus can trigger an entire cascade of complex responses. Diagnosis requires data, but data can only serve as a reference, not a dependency; ultimately, the judgement of an experienced doctor is indispensable. This is exactly why medicine cannot simply be subsumed by science.

Cure & Care: You often distinguish between "the Way of Medicine" (Yidao) and "the Art of Medicine" (Yishu). Could you elaborate on them?

Fan Daiming: The Way of Medicine concerns "whether one should act"; the Art of Medicine concerns "whether one can act". A technique can be used to treat disease, but only wisdom can save a life. Today, many young doctors possess increasingly refined technical skills, yet when confronted with complex conditions, what they lack precisely is the judgement of "whether one should" – and this is the very lesson that Holistic Integrative Medicine is meant to supply.

II. The Origins of Holistic Integrative Medicine and the Issues It Addresses

Cure & Care: Could you please tell us, what made you to propose the concept of "Holistic Integrative Medicine"?

Fan Daiming: The roots lie in the excessive fragmentation of medical subspecialties. As modern medicine has become ever more finely subdivided, a single disease is now parsed across multiple subspecialties. While a subspecialty-level capability in diagnosis and treatment has indeed improved, however, the capability in holistic clinical problem-solving has correspondingly weakened. China records over ten billion annual outpatient visits. In the past, a single doctor could comprehensively diagnose and treat a range of conditions; while today, by contrast, multiple specialists must come together to manage a single disease – the condition is fragmented and dissected, patients are left more exhausted, and medical resources are placed under even greater strain.

The COVID-19 pandemics served as a telling test case: doctors from departments of respiratory and infectious disease worked on the front lines, while radiology, nursing, medical device enterprises, and the whole of society were coordinated in support. No single country, single discipline or single technology acting alone could adequately confront a challenge of such genuine complexity. This only reinforced my conviction that what we want is not fragmentation but integration.

Holistic Integrative Medicine is not about a technical integration – it is, more fundamentally, a cultural integration. Over the past decade, we have advanced this philosophy from academic circles into a practice network encompassing more than 230 academicians and over 1.2 million doctors, and we have piloted integrative healthcare delivery systems in nine cities across China.

III. The Core Tenets and Practice of Holistic Integrative Medicine

Cure & Care: Within the philosophy of Holistic Integrative Medicine, "the body's innate healing forces" is the key concept. Could you please tell a little bit more about it?

Fan Daiming: I have proposed that the human body possesses seven innate forces: the capability for autonomous generation, self-coupling, spontaneous repair, free metabolism, self-regulated equilibrium, self-protection, and mental-spiritual governance. These constitute the most fundamental internal wellsprings of every individual's health, and the very foundation upon which we fight against disease and sustain vitality. Understanding and activating these innate forces is far more fundamental than relying solely on drugs and laboratory indicators. This is also why I insist that medicine must not fix its gaze on "disease" alone, but must also see "the person".

Cure & Care: At the level of concrete practice, what outcomes, would you like to address, has the philosophy of Holistic Integrative Medicine yielded?

Fan Daiming: The most representative achievement is the CACA for Holistic Integrative Management of Cancer – China's first integrative diagnostic and treatment guideline covering 53 tumours. It integrates the characteristics of Chinese patients with the realities of China's healthcare resource distribution to provide a localised clinical framework, and it is now widely implemented across the nation's oncology care system.

At the community level, we have proposed strengthening integrative service capacity for chronic disease management to address the challenges of an aging society. One concrete approach involves combining smart wearable devices with community-based elderly care systems – which enable real-time monitoring of health indicators of elderly patients and link the data to family doctors for immediate intervention. This "medical-care integration" model has already significantly reduced the incidence of diabetic complications in several pilot regions.

In medical education, I have long advocated that medical training must transcend the confines of subspecialisation by introducing courses in Holistic Integrative Medicine, cultivating the students to understand disease as a holistic phenomenon through simulated clinical practices and multidisciplinary case discussions. This educational reform has already been adopted at numerous medical schools across China.

IV. Holistic Integrative Medicine in the Era of Technology

Cure & Care: Artificial intelligence is profoundly reshaping medicine. What is you view about the impact of AI on the doctors?

Fan Daiming: AI can compose a poem, but it cannot devise a "strategy of integration". It can compute vast quantities of data, yet it cannot comprehend the human heart. I once spoke with an AI entrepreneur who declared his intention to "replace a million doctors with AI". I asked him in smiling: "Have you ever created a human being?"

AI is a specialist; the physician must be a generalist. AI can assist in diagnosis – for instance, by improving the accuracy of early detection of gastric cancer in medical imaging analysis – and I fully support such applications. I have consistently called for the establishment of interdisciplinary teams to deeply integrate algorithmic capability with clinical needs. But questions such as "whether a treatment should proceed" or "how the competing considerations should be weighed" require the exercise of wisdom, and such judgement will forever belong to human beings alone. The future of Holistic Integrative Medicine does not lie in opposing AI, but in anchoring it to humanistic values, restoring technology to its proper role as a tool. When the world finds itself mired in ever more entangled complexity, only a human-centred medicine can hold back the tide.

Cure & Care: Drawing on China's experience, what would you expect the global advancement of Holistic Integrative Medicine?

Fan Daiming: Holistic Integrative Medicine emerged from the practical soil of China – where the sheer scale of the population makes the contradictions of subspecialty fragmentation especially acute. Yet the issues it addresses are shared by all of humanity: the allocation of resources, the challenges of ageing populations, the burden of chronic diseases, and the balance between technology and human nature – challenges recognise no borders between countries.

I have myself served as President of the World Congress of Gastroenterology (WCOG), and I understand well the importance of international academic exchange in bringing a medical philosophy to maturity. In recent years, the concept of Holistic Integrative Medicine has attracted growing international attention. I hope it can genuinely become a form of "Chinese wisdom" contributed to global medicine – not as a replacement for the scientific tradition of Western medicine, but, as I often put: two trains running on separate tracks, each advancing along its own course, yet ultimately arriving at the same destination – serving the health and well-being of humankind.

Editor's Postscript

From the philosophy of "the unity of heaven and humanity" to a "holistic mode of thinking", from the CACA guidelines to pilot programmes integrating medical care with elderly care, the system of Holistic Integrative Medicine that Academician Fan Daiming has established over more than a decade represents an attempt to restore "the person" at the centre of medicine in an era defined by ever-deepening subspecialisation and relentless technological advance. This is at once a theoretical enquiry and a practical undertaking bearing on the future of healthcare in China and, indeed, across the world. Cure & Care will continue to follow the progress of Holistic Integrative Medicine and looks forward to deepening its academic collaboration with Academician Fan's team.

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