Ven. Gangxiao: ECT Therapy for Intractable Illnesses — Chapter 1: Raising the Question

Abstract: There is a class of illnesses rooted in psychological causes. When treated with standard physiological medicine, they often respond poorly, becoming what we call intractable conditions. ECT counts as both a device-based therapy and, at the same time, a fast, safe, affordable form of psychological treatment. It also carries one clear advantage: it works universally. Unlike other forms of psychotherapy, it does not require digging into the specific root causes of a person’s psychological distress.

Chapter 1: Raising the Question

Medicine has advanced to the point where major surgeries — opening the chest or skull — can be performed with ease, yet it remains helpless against certain minor ailments. For years, people have claimed to have discovered "miracle cures" for all kinds of conditions, but none have stood the test of time. Some chronic illnesses never fully heal, and recurrent conditions flare up again and again, just as they always have. In the 1980s, for instance, someone claimed to have invented the "Divine Water of China" for treating alopecia areata. It shot to fame both at home and abroad overnight, but more than a decade later, alopecia areata is still widely seen as a stubborn, incurable condition. Fine chemical engineers developed a "wonder drug" for gastric and duodenal ulcers that was even added to university textbooks — but not long after, clinicians found that relapse rates were very high once patients stopped taking it. Neutralizing stomach acid with alkaline baking soda, thinning high blood viscosity and elevated lipid levels with saline, dilating airways to relieve asthma… These measures are clearly only temporary. No matter how effective they are in the moment, once the alkaline reaction fades, the excess fluid is flushed from the body, and the medication is fully metabolized, the stomach acid returns, the blood stays thick and lipid-heavy, the asthma flares up again… Some chronic and recurrent conditions eventually end up classified as intractable or refractory illnesses.

Why does this happen?

Professor Shōma Morita (1874–1938) explained that this is because "the medical perspective of our era is often oversimplified, confined strictly to biological factors. When someone presents with a complaint as common as a headache or fatigue, clinicians immediately and single-mindedly zero in on questions like whether the brain is congested or the blood is ‘toxic’ — with no consideration given to psychological factors, and even less to dynamic, lived realities like a patient’s attitude toward daily life." "As a result, we get trapped in the empty delusion of a mechanical mindset that assumes the mere mention of illness immediately calls for a prescription." You can find these two passages on pages 4 and 8 of The Radical Cure of Neurasthenia and Obsessive Ideas, published by People’s Medical Publishing House in 1996.

The World Health Organization’s updated definition of health states that a person is only fully healthy if they have sound physical health, mental health, and strong social adaptation. This authoritative definition was introduced to align with the shift from the purely biomedical model to the biopsychosocial model of care.

Some illnesses are not rooted in biological or somatic causes at all, or are only partially rooted in them. If you treat them with biomedicine alone, how could they not become intractable conditions?

Could some diseases really have causes outside the biological and somatic realm? Yes. Below, I will walk through several angles to explain this.