poor country as China, medical security for the majority of people in rural areas has been solved with relatively low cost, and has resulted in the realization of a basically fair medical service. When I was studying, I helped to build the medical system through the countryside. Since the 1970s, I have engaged in medical work and participated in the Hexi Corridor Medical Team and Tibetan Ali Medical Team appointed by Premier Zhou that year, walking the whole Hexi Corridor on foot. Back then, Ali was called the “roof of the roof, snowland of snowland, and plateau of
The incidence rate of congenital heart disease in China was nearly 7 percent, and there were nearly four million patients with congenital heart disease.
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plateau.” In Ali, I came to recognize five “extreme” spirits that characterize the region and the task of establishing the volunteer medical sytem: most hard-working, most patient, most dedicated, most united, and most fighting. These spirits were the spiritual support of the Ali liberation army and medical team that year. After completing Ali medical assistance and returning to Beijing, I continued to engage in work related to cardiovascular disease treatment. In the early 1990s, I developed technology for treating tachyarrhythmias with radiofrequency catheter ablation in China, and held seminars to promote its application. I founded the Great Wall International Congress of Cardiology (GWICC), introduced and initiated the technology, trained medical personnel, and explored and established the “green channel” service mode for acute myocardial infarction. In 2002, I began to pay attention to congenital heart disease treatment. As both the radiofrequency ablation of cardiac arrhythmia and interventional therapy of congenital heart disease were radical cure technologies, I was lucky in my life to promote and apply these two technologies to benefit chronic patients. In that year, I opened two outpatient departments for congenital heart disease, in Peking University People’s Hospital and Beijing Tongren Hospital. The incidence rate of congenital heart disease in China was nearly 7 percent, and there were nearly four million patients with congenital heart disease. However, in 2002, only a few dozen patients went to the outpatient department. I asked myself, why did the hospital have a large sign there, if it had no patients? In the long “May Day” holiday after the SARS outbreak in 2003, I led a medical team to Anhui Taihe County for free medical service, which was an impoverished area in central China. During the five-day holiday, we screened more than 400 children with congenital heart disease. Bian Hong, a young doctor in our team, said, “Mr. Hu, I see not only the congenital heart disease encyclopedia, but also the health status encyclopedia in China in these five days, which is never seen in Beijing before and is very astonishing.” Most astonishing was that: 1) Disease that could have been radically cured was delayed in treatment to the point of being an incurable disease. Congenital heart disease could be radically cured when the patient is 3 years old, but would difficult to cure when the patient is 13 years old, and could not be cured when the patient is 30 years old. Many people eventually fell within the range of incurable disease. 2) Very few of these children went elsewhere to treat the disease, because of poverty. During the “May Day” holiday, the weather was not very warm, children slept all over the ground, and they could not afford to live in even the cheapest guest house. 3) Lack of fundamental knowledge. One child with congenital defects suffered from blood poisoning due to the bacterial infection in his blood, but his father tried to save his life by giving him a wedding to counteract bad luck. This would never have been seen in the city. As a result, I concluded that our health care system had problems at the time. I called it “watching the fire from the other side of the river.” Advanced technology made enormous progress on one side of the river, which was
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