Experts advocate finding, diagnosing and treating cancer as early as possible. However, many patients who have been diagnosed with cancer early still couldn't get the best treatment because the standard cancer treatment was not available in different hospitals.

Wu Yilong, the vice director of Guangdong Provincial Hospital and the director of the Cancer Center, joined the discussion of normative medical treatments on cancer. According to Wu, for those patients whose cancer diameter is less than one centimeter, surgery could improve the survival rate by up to 90 percent for five years, and to 80 percent for 10 years. In fact, hospitals do not consider the patients' position but the hospitals' medical equipment and adopt chemotherapy or other ways to treat these patients. Though some cancer patients were diagnosed in the early period, their deaths were accelerated for the delay of proper treatment in the best period. They also had to pay a large mount of money for the treatment.

Wu Yilong also pointed out that the medical system in China made doctors do things in their own way. One kind of cancer may have many different treatments. The patient might receive chemotherapy to treat his cancer from a physician, or surgery from a surgeon, or interventional treatment from an intervention doctor. Wu believes that the way to treat cancer is to organize a group of experts, consider synthetically for the best treatment and adopt it first.

In order to solve those problems, the Ministry of Health, Chinese Medical Association and Chinese Anticancer Association have organized experts to evaluate the research of different cancers synthetically. Experts will divide cancer into early, interim and late periods, and make the best treatments, which are recognized by the world according to disease characteristics in different periods.

Wu also introduced that the standardization of medical treatments on cancer will greatly improve the effective survival rate of the cancer patients. He said: "Hospitals will not need to buy new equipment, patients will not need to pay more money, and the survival rate will be increased by 15 percent after the standardization of cancer treatments."

China plans to draw up normative medical treatments for all kinds of cancer in two years. Then, hospitals will start from the patients' positions and adopt uniform treatments directly towards the disease. Now, the normative medical treatment on nine different cancers has finished including lung cancer, gastric cancer, esophagus and intestinal cancer. These treatments will be published and carried out in June.

(China.org.cn by Wu Nanlan June 10, 2003)