Dear Fellow Human Beings,
This is an open letter addressed to all of humanity. My purpose in writing it is simple: to call on everyone to act quickly to solve a longstanding problem—the persistently high death rate from heart disease—by using a simple and effective method.
Every day, tens of thousands of people around the world face sudden cardiac death, while those around them often feel helpless and do not know what to do. This is a tragedy. But if there is a simple method that could potentially prevent these deaths, and people know about it yet dare not use it, would that not be an even greater tragedy? When a method intended to save lives is regarded as illegal, is this a lament for human civilization or a triumph of forces working against humanity? In an age when the internet and AI are so advanced, the vast majority of people still do not know about this simple, supposedly effective lifesaving method—or do not dare to use it. As a result, countless people live in fear of illness and pain. This is no longer merely a tragedy; it seems more like a bizarre, ridiculous, and absurd farce that humanity has become strangely attached to. The purpose of publishing this open letter is to bring this farce to an end! As Wings of Liberation puts it: “When you discover the moral of the story, you are free to direct the remaining chapters with holy confidence, untouched by the drama, smiling and enjoying the show.”
Sudden cardiac death is a global medical challenge. To this day, the medical community has not found a sufficiently effective way to prevent and provide emergency treatment for fatal heart attacks and sudden cardiac death. According to the World Health Organization, cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a group of disorders affecting the heart and blood vessels, commonly referred to as heart disease and stroke. CVD is the world's leading cause of death. It claims more lives than cancer, influenza, pneumonia, traffic accidents, AIDS, firearms, and fires combined. Every year, 20.5 million people die from cardiovascular disease, accounting for 33% of all deaths worldwide. Approximately 90% of people who experience cardiac arrest outside a hospital ultimately do not survive.
Because these emergencies usually occur when no doctor is present, bystanders must rely on emergency measures that can be performed by ordinary people. As a result, tens of thousands of people worldwide die from cardiac arrest every day. Many people who already know they have heart disease carry medication with them, anxiously waiting for their condition to strike at any moment, feeling powerless to do anything about it. Even more people have no idea that they have heart disease, because most cardiac conditions cannot be diagnosed in a hospital. Consequently, many people experience sudden cardiac death without any warning signs.
Faced with such a large number of sudden cardiac deaths, the medical community seems unable to offer an adequate solution. The standard Western medical approach to resuscitation is cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). Unfortunately, its success rate is said to be very low—less than 10% in the United States and less than 1% in China. An American Heart Association news article titled New Guidelines Aim to Prevent Cardiac Arrest acknowledges: “Cardiac arrest is difficult to predict. About half of those who experience sudden cardiac arrest have no early symptoms; more than 350,000 Americans experience out-of-hospital cardiac arrest every year, and only about one in ten survives.” In February 2025, an article titled Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest in Apparently Healthy Young People, published in JAMA Cardiology, again acknowledged: “An estimated 350,000 to 450,000 cases of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest occur in the United States each year, with approximately 10% surviving.”
If this is the situation even in the medically advanced United States, one can imagine the number of people dying suddenly from cardiac arrest in other countries and regions.
Yet hidden beneath these countless tragedies is what I believe to be good news: a method for addressing sudden cardiac death has already emerged, and tens of thousands of people have reportedly tried it in real-life situations over the years.
This method is called the Slapping (Paida) Emergency Method, or Slapping Resuscitation.
It is extremely simple: when someone experiences an acute cardiac emergency, vigorously slap the inner elbow area, known as the elbow crease. Like CPR, it is a non-medical intervention that ordinary people can perform. A method is essentially a kind of procedural knowledge, so we can compare it to an entirely open form of AI.
According to reports of real-life experiences accumulated over the past decade or more, involving hundreds of thousands of people, slapping the elbow crease has reportedly resolved or improved various acute cardiac symptoms, with a claimed effectiveness rate of more than 95%. These symptoms include chest pain, palpitations, irregular heartbeat, chest tightness, dizziness, shoulder pain, back pain, headaches, and difficulty breathing.
To date, according to the author, 116 people whose hearts and breathing had stopped and who had lost consciousness were treated by slapping the elbow crease, with a reported success rate of 100%. (For details, see Slap to Save Millions — A Clinical Report on Heart Emergences.) Please note that these statistics, as presented, go beyond the standards of conventional clinical trials, because the cases are said to have occurred in real-life situations rather than in deliberately designed experiments. Indeed, one cannot simply make people simulate the experience of being on the verge of death and create a corresponding control group. If slapping had worked in only a few cases of sudden cardiac arrest, it might be dismissed as coincidence. But if the same result has reportedly been repeated in more than a hundred cases, can it still be dismissed as coincidence?
Even more significant, the people performing these alleged lifesaving interventions were almost all ordinary individuals without medical training. The rescues reportedly took place in homes, on roadsides, in cars, on trains, on airplanes, and in various public places. Their common experience, according to these reports, was that when the elbow crease was slapped during a cardiac emergency, symptoms generally resolved or improved within approximately ten minutes. The problem is that these real-life cases were not clinical trials conducted by medical institutions. Moreover, the reported effects far exceed what medical experts currently understand or what existing medical theories would predict. As a result, medical experts and the media have generally responded to Slapping Resuscitation with skepticism and criticism.
Skepticism is normal. But testing a claim and determining whether it is false should be even more straightforward: why not conduct clinical trials of Slapping Resuscitation to find out? Because such trials have not been conducted, the method has, in effect, been treated as an illegal practice! Media investigations into Slapping Resuscitation have also been peculiar. Journalists interview medical experts who have never performed slapping-based emergency treatment, rather than interviewing people who claim to have used it successfully. This clearly departs from the first principle of journalism: truth—relying on facts, making every effort to reconstruct what actually happened, and avoiding predetermined conclusions.
The purpose of this letter is not to demand that the medical community and the media immediately accept Slapping Resuscitation. Rather, it is to urge doctors and journalists to conduct clinical trials and investigations as soon as possible, publish their own clinical and investigative reports, and verify the method's effectiveness and scientific validity. Only then can we determine whether it should be made more widely available to humanity and potentially save more lives.
Because most sudden cardiac deaths occur outside hospitals, both the medical community and governments emphasize the importance of teaching ordinary people CPR. If Slapping Resuscitation, like CPR, is considered a non-medical intervention that ordinary people can perform, then surely it deserves to be investigated and, if proven effective and safe, taught to the public as soon as possible.
In addition to medical institutions, news organizations, charitable organizations, businesses, and individuals should all be able to investigate this method, subject to appropriate ethical and safety safeguards. There are several reasons for this call:
1. Slapping Resuscitation is claimed to have a very high success rate.
According to the reports cited so far, Slapping Resuscitation has been used in attempts to save 116 people experiencing sudden cardiac emergencies who had lost consciousness and whose hearts and breathing had stopped. The reported success rate is 100%. I understand that these statistics have not been verified or endorsed by medical institutions. That is precisely why I am calling on medical institutions to conduct larger-scale randomized clinical trials of Slapping Resuscitation as soon as possible.
2. Slapping Resuscitation is extremely simple. Ordinary people can reportedly learn the basic technique in one minute. The method consists of vigorously slapping the elbow creases on both arms.
The United States has a population of more than 300 million, and approximately 70 million people have received formal CPR training. President George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush even invited experts to the White House to teach CPR. This demonstrates the American government's strong desire to address sudden cardiac death. If the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Central Intelligence Agency had discovered Slapping Resuscitation earlier, former Presidents Clinton and Bush and former Vice President Cheney might not have needed heart surgery.
3. Slapping Resuscitation is claimed to be safe and free of side effects because the slapping area is far from the internal organs.
By contrast, CPR can cause rib fractures, and this complication is said to be common. Ask medical experts or search online, and you can learn more about this issue.
4. If you are concerned about the risks of using slapping to treat sudden cardiac arrest, you can begin by investigating its use for other common cardiac symptoms.
These include chest pain, a racing heart, chest tightness, palpitations, headaches, irregular heartbeat, and difficulty breathing. Such symptoms are frequently encountered in hospitals, nursing homes, and private homes. According to the claims presented here, vigorously slapping the elbow crease for approximately ten minutes produces improvement.
For patients whose breathing and heartbeat have stopped and who are unconscious, you can first use CPR. If repeated attempts prove unsuccessful and you give up on CPR, then trying slapping would be reasonable.
5. Slapping Resuscitation does not involve medication, so clinical testing of Slapping Resuscitation should be relatively straightforward.
You only need to know where the patient's elbow crease is. For example, an 11-year-old girl reportedly used slapping to save her grandmother during a cardiac emergency. (For details, see Slap to Save Millions— A Clinical Report on Heart Emergencies)
Since countless ordinary people have already tried this method and written their own clinical reports, medical institutions and news organizations should investigate it and conduct clinical trials as soon as possible to verify these claims. If tens of thousands of people die from sudden cardiac events every day, then whoever conducts clinical trials first and publishes a clinical report could become a hero by helping establish Slapping Resuscitation as a publicly accessible emergency intervention—provided its effectiveness and safety are demonstrated. Its significance could be comparable to the benefits that opening up AI has brought to humanity.
Although this slapping method originates in traditional Chinese culture, the strange thing is that it has remained a secret technique practiced by only a small number of people. The reason it has become secret, however, is not necessarily a desire to keep it confidential. Rather, I believe that it is so simple and its purported results so impressive that it invites misunderstanding and defamation. Even many practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine and advocates of natural medicine dismiss it contemptuously. As a result, a method that could potentially benefit all of humanity has remained shrouded in closed-mindedness, ignorance, arrogance, and prejudice. It has been forced into obscurity, and no one knows how long it will remain there.
The good news is that this open letter has somehow reached you.
Just as the invention of the printing press accelerated the spread of information, broke the Church's monopoly on knowledge and authority, and helped promote the Reformation and Renaissance in Europe, enabling Europe to emerge from the darkness of the Middle Ages, the internet and AI are now breaking down what I see as the monopoly of hospitals and pharmaceutical companies over medical authority and healing knowledge.
Since you are reading the letter now, you should easily know about this supposedly simple and effective non-medical slapping method, and you can immediately conduct your own experiment using it to address cardiac emergencies, even if you are not a doctor. If you experience pain or develop sha—purple or black marks on your skin—when slapping your elbow crease, congratulations! You have received what I consider a gift from Heaven: Slapping Resuscitation. Do not be frightened by the pain or the appearance of these marks. According to traditional natural-healing beliefs, these are common phenomena known as a healing crisis, sometimes described as a temporary worsening of symptoms during recovery. They are regarded as both a diagnostic sign and a healing process. The more severe the pain and the darker or more extensive the marks, the more serious the underlying illness is believed to be—and, at the same time, the more effective the healing is believed to be.
Many people who experience cardiac symptoms but cannot obtain a definitive diagnosis of heart disease in a hospital can, according to this theory, identify their own heart problems through the pain and marks produced by slapping, thereby addressing potential future cardiac emergencies in advance. The underlying logic, as I understand it, is straightforward: the elbow crease is associated with the Heart Meridian, Pericardium Meridian, and Lung Meridian in traditional Chinese medicine.
Pain and sha are interpreted as evidence that these meridians are blocked. Slapping is then believed to clear the blockages, thereby improving cardiac symptoms. Western medicine attributes heart disease to obstructions in blood flow. But without energy to drive it, blood cannot flow. The meridians, according to traditional Chinese medicine, are the channels through which a person's energy, or qi, circulates. From this perspective, blockages in the meridians are the fundamental cause of heart disease. Therefore, once the meridians are cleared, obstructions to blood flow will naturally disappear, and thus this approach is claimed not only to address acute cardiac symptoms but also to prevent future cardiac events.
However, the emergence of Slapping Resuscitation is not intended to replace CPR. Rather, it is intended to offer humanity another method for emergency response to sudden cardiac death, one that could coexist with other approaches and contribute to solving this difficult problem. Making this method widely available could be particularly important in regions with limited medical resources and among older populations, who experience higher rates of cardiac emergencies. The sooner this method is widely adopted, the more people it will save—or so its proponents believe.
As more ordinary people learn the technique, its purported effectiveness will naturally encourage medical institutions to conduct clinical trials sooner. The sooner medical institutions conduct clinical trials of Slapping Resuscitation, the sooner governments can decide whether it should be recommended or promoted. If medical experts reject Slapping Resuscitation without conducting clinical trials, even though they do not fully understand it, they are clearly failing to meet the most basic requirements of scientific inquiry. After all, apart from clinical trials, what other way is there to establish whether Slapping Resuscitation is truly effective?
Therefore, I hereby issue this call:
Regardless of age or gender, and regardless of whether you are a doctor, you can experiment with Slapping Resuscitation as a method for responding to cardiac emergencies. Once you conduct this experiment, what you stand to lose is heart disease and fear, while what you stand to gain is health and happiness.
To be or not to be?
Illness or health?
Preventing or waiting?
Slap or not slap?
The choice is entirely yours!
Xiao Hongchi
October 16, 2026
