A few days before Craig Chase was discharged from the Jiangsu Provincial People’s Hospital in Nanjing, his doctor told him something he never expected to hear: his cancer had been cured.

“His English was not so good, so he used Google Translate. When he said I was cured, I told him it was impossible — there is no cure for multiple myeloma,” he recalls. “But he said, ‘no, you’re definitely cured’. It was unbelievable.”

Unbelievable, perhaps, but also true. When Mr Chase, now 57, returned home to America after his six weeks of treatment in China to undergo further tests, his doctors could find no trace of multiple myeloma. The blood cancer he had suffered for three years — which had threatened to end his life — was gone.