Shanghai real estate executive Immanuel Wang's efforts two years ago to seek medical advice on treating his mother's lung cancer were painful. No matter which doctors he went to or how long he waited for an appointment, no one could spare him more than 10 minutes.
'A doctor often has to see about 40 patients in a morning. He just can't spend much time on you,' he says.
Wang turned to the internet and joined an instant-messaging group set up to share information among lung cancer patients, but that, too, proved inadequate. So last year he founded an online forum, 51qiji (which sounds like 'I want a miracle' in Putonghua), to provide a channel for lung cancer sufferers and their families to help each other.
Patients' self-help groups for illnesses such as haemophilia and cancer have mushroomed on the mainland, a telling sign of the dire state of its health care system. 51qiji.com, for example, has registered about 3,000 members over the past year. The names many adopt - Be Tough, Mommy Healthy and Save Father, for example - reveal their frame of mind. By sharing medical histories, exchanging information about new drugs and effective therapies, and offering encouragement, patients and their families hope to make the most of limited medical resources and support each other in their fight against the disease.
'We set up the self-help group in an attempt to break the current medical information barrier,' says Wang, a thirtysomething property planner. 'Most members are late-stage lung cancer patients. About 90 per cent of them won't live long. Perhaps it's this desperate situation that sparks their strong will to survive.'
Lung cancer is the No1 killer disease on the mainland. In 2005 about 500,000 people were found to have lung cancer and the number is growing by 26.9 per cent annually. Medical experts attribute the high rate of lung cancer primarily to air pollution and widespread smoking (two out of three Chinese men smoke). Unchecked, the number of lung cancer patients on the mainland is projected to hit 1 million by 2025.
