World's Largest Medicineless
Hospital

by Luke Chan
ChiLel
Qigong

Huaxia Zhineng Qigong Clinic &
Training Center, simply known as the Center, normally has more than four
thousand people living there, including doctors, patients, ChiLel teachers,
trainees, and supporting personnel. The Center was established in 1988 in the
city of Zigachong and later, in 1992, relocated to the city of Qinhuangdao. In
1995, it again expanded to its present address, an old army hospital in the city
of Fengrun, two hours by train from Beijing. It is directed by its founder, Dr.
Pang Ming, a Qigong grandmaster and physician trained in both Western and
Chinese traditional medicine. This hospital is the largest of its kind in China
and probably in the world. The Center avoids medicines and special diets in
favor of exercise, love, and life energy. It is a non-profit organization and is
recognized by the Chinese government as a legitimate clinic. Over the years, the
Center has treated more than one hundred and eighty diseases, the overall
success rate being more than 95%.

I spent the entire month of May living
in the Center, observing first hand how the hospital operates and interviewing
more than one hundred people who have miraculously recovered from incurable
diseases such as cancer, diabetes, arthritis, heart disease, severe depression,
paralysis, and systemic lupus. Many times I was moved to tears while listening
to these accounts of heroic struggle against disease. One mother told me that
she was so weak that she couldn't even pick up a kitchen knife to kill herself
and so attempted to end her life by not eating. But when her six-year-old son
tried to spoon feed her a bowl of milk while her eleven-year-old held a towel to
wipe any spills, she decided to live at any cost. Since doctors couldn't help
her, she turned to ChiLel and, against all odds, recovered. She is now a teacher
at the Center.

The Power of ChiLel
ChiLel, the method employed in the
Center, was developed by Dr. Pang. The method is based on the 5,000-year-old
concept of qigong (chigong, chi kung) as well as modern medical knowledge. Dr.
Pang, reverently known as Lao-shi, the Teacher, has written more than nine books
on ChiLel.

ChiLel consists of four parts...

1.Strong belief (Shan
Shin): a belief that chi or life energy, can heal all ailments, including one's
own. Students build belief by listening to testimonials of recovered patients
and learning about chi and its healing effects.

2.Group Healing (Chu
Chong): before a group of students begins ChiLel, the teacher verbally
synchronizes the thinking of the group to obtain chi from the universe and bring
it down into a healing energy field, shrouding everyone including the teacher
himself or herself. The healing effect is enhanced because the group is acting
as one.

3.Chi Healing (Fa Chi): Facilitating chi healing by teachers
teachers bring healing energy from the universe to each individual to facilitate
healing.

4.Practice (Lan Gong): Students learn easy-to-follow ChiLel
movements and practice them over and over again. The methods, parts of Zhineng
qigong, are called:

Lift Chi Up and Pour Chi Down Method.
Three
Centers Merge Standing Method.

Patient Treatment
When a patient enters
the hospital, he is diagnosed by a doctor, and then assigned to a class of fifty
or so people for a 24-day treatment period. He spends most of his time
practicing ChiLel, eight hours a day without television, newspapers or
telephone. Those who can stand up practice standing; those who can sit practice
in their chairs; and those who can't move practice in their beds. I was moved by
the dedication of these students.

Despite its amazing success at healing,
the Center is little known even in China because of its policy of not
advertising in newspapers or magazines. However, the Center is well known among
its estimated eight million ChiLel practitioners. Through word of mouth,
thousands of people from all over China are coming to the Center every month.
Indeed, ChiLel has a great number of followers and the Center is the brain of
this vast organization. New techniques for treating diseases are developed
daily.

For example, a new way of demonstrating the effectiveness of chi
for treating cancer has been developed. I witnessed a cancer patient being
treated by four ChiLel teachers while the patient's bladder cancer was viewed on
a screen via an ultra-sound machine, and monitored by two doctors. The cancer
literally disappeared in front of my eyes in less than a minute as the teachers
emitted chi into the patient, dissolving the cancer! In fact, I videotaped this
incredible act. Ten days later, I requested the doctors to double check if the
patient's tumor was gone. Kindly enough the doctors put the same patient's
bladder again on screen and we saw no trace of cancer. Later I was told that a
major German TV station crew, visiting the Center a week before, had
successfully videotaped the same process with other cancer patients.

The
Center has over six hundred staff members, including twenty-six Western-trained
doctors. Since no medicine is prescribed, there aren't any pharmacists. Doctors,
who prefer to be called teachers, play only a minor role in this special
hospital. Occasionally, they are called upon to attend emergency cases. Their
main function is to diagnose patients when they come in to register and again
after each 24-day training period.

Their diagnoses are classified into
four categories for statistical purposes.

1.Cured: Symptoms disappear and
appropriate instruments ( e.g. EKG, ultra-sound, X-ray, CT and so on) register
normal.

2.Very Effective: Symptoms almost disappear and instruments show
great improvement.

3.Effective: Noticeable improvements, and student can
eat, sleep, and feel good.

4.Non-effective: No change or even
worse.

According to "Summary of Zhineng Qigong's Healing Effects on
Chronic Diseases", published by the Center in 1991, data of 7,936 patients
showed an overall effective healing rate of 94.96%. (15.20% cured; 37.68% very
effective; 42.09% effective.)

In the Center, no matter how sick a person
is, he is still addressed as a "student" never "patient". Why? Because he is
learning an art the goal of which is to heal oneself, not to rely on doctors.
Therefore no doctor-patient relationships exist.

Students are enrolled in
a 24-days treatment program. The tuition fee is only one hundred yuan (about
twelve dollars). Students can spend as little as six hundred yuan (about seventy
dollars) per month! The Center is probably the most inexpensive hospital in the
world and is truly a non-profit organization. Yet the Center is an independent,
self-sufficient organization, without any help from government or private
foundations.

How do they operate so efficiently? Because many of the
doctors, ChiLel teachers, and supporting personnel are former students who have
recovered from serious illnesses themselves and have now returned voluntarily to
"serve the sick", with very little pay. Teachers play the roles of doctor,
nurse, social worker, cheerleader, parent, friend, brother, and sister. Their
effectiveness is measured by the healing rate of their students.

Another
reason for the Center's effective but low-budget operation is that it uses group
therapy. Students live in groups of four, eight or sixteen persons per room. By
living in groups, students develop in a cooperative spirit of caring and love
toward each other. Many of those I interviewed had been rejected by their former
hospitals as "incurable," and, therefore, had regarded the Center as their last
hope. As though sailing on the same boat in the ocean, students bond together
against their common enemy's disease.

Trained to Heal
Just as
hospitals associate with medical schools to train young people to enter into the
medical profession, the Center also has ChiLel schools to train ChiLel
professionals. There is a Zhineng Qigong Academy and one-month and three-month
instructor training schools. The Academy, established in 1992, has a two-year
training program for young men and women under the age of thirty who have the
minimum of a high-school education. The one-month and three-months
instructor-training programs are for anyone interested in ChiLel. I was told
that there are typically more than a thousand students in both programs in
school.

In addition, just as prestigious hospitals have research
programs, the Center has many on-going research projects both on site and at
different university campuses around the country. When I requested the person in
charge, a retired college professor, to show me some published papers, he gave
me two volumes of experiment data, as thick as a telephone book!

Besides
doctors, teachers, and students, there are hundreds of supporting personnel,
working in the office, cafeteria, bookstore, and so on. All of them are ChiLel
practitioners and they practice ChiLel together in the morning and in the
evening, about three hours a day. As they say, it is not just a job, it is a
ChiLel job.

The Center is open only ten months a year because of lack of
heating in the rooms during winter. The Center is currently building a home for
itself, a "ChiLel City" in a place near Beijing, with better facilities to
accommodate the ever-increasing number of students, including Americans and
others coming from abroad.

I
asked the founder, Lao-shi, why didn't he promote ChiLel to the world sooner. He
replied that many people need proof whether chi works or not. So instead of
arguing with others, he preferred to work solidly by treating patients and
collecting valuable data. As a result, tens of thousands of documented cases
over a period of eight years have been collected and, "Now we are ready. Please
tell the world that we exist and ChiLel can benefit
mankind."

Copyright © 1998 by Benefactor
Press, All rights in the above article are
reserved.