BEIJING: At seven one morning, 92-year-old Chen Yuzhi was sitting at the breakfast table, eating while answering asthma-related messages on her phone.
As a former chief physician in the department of allergy at Capital Center for Children’s Health, Capital Medical University, she has devoted her life to preventing and treating childhood asthma.
Her phone contains the contact information for over 100 primary care doctors, and she remembers exactly which types of cases each one has struggled with.
WeChat, online meetings, app-based patient records, even AI software — she has tried to keep up with every tool young people use.
In the 1980s, Chen went to Australia as a visiting scholar to study the standard asthma treatments then used internationally.
After returning home, she found that many hospitals were prescribing steroids and antibiotics indiscriminately for childhood asthma. Children suffered repeated attacks, and parents were at a loss.
In 1987, she and several young medical workers opened an asthma clinic, using pulmonary function tests and long-term chronic disease management to follow each child closely.
Over the more than three decades, she has helped more than a dozen hospitals across China establish pediatric asthma clinics.
She has also led more than 30 academic conferences on childhood allergies, more than 20 summer and winter camps for children with asthma, and more than 10 fun sports days for them.
These efforts have trained clinicians and educated children and parents about asthma prevention and treatment.
Chen believes that moderate exercise helps control asthma early, and that letting children get close to nature and experience the world is far more meaningful than simply relying on medication after symptoms appear.
Now in her 90s, Chen is often urged by her husband, who worries that she may tire herself out, to spend less time on her phone and stop worrying so much.
She agrees, but in practice she cannot stop.
She said that if you help one doctor, you may help a whole group of children.
The feeling of being needed is deeply reassuring, she added. –The Daily Mail-China Daily news exchange item
