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| A TCM pharmacy. Photo by Sam Steiner. |
By Beth Green
Many times when you visit the doctor or pharmacy in China, you’re given
a choice: traditional treatments made from herbs and mysterious ingredients, or
Western-patented pharmaceuticals.
The first city I lived in in China, in Southern China, had a specific hospital for
Traditional Chinese Medicine (often just called TCM). At the bus stop outside it, passengers boarded wearing white bandages stained with brown
poultices. Pharmacies usually featured both the comforting little rectangular
boxes of pills that spelled out the ingredients in both Chinese and English and
large dispensaries full of odd natural items that often looked like
hedge-clippings or leftovers from a taxidermist’s shop. The air near the
hospital and in the pharmacies had a distinctive smell—bitter and earthy.
I was always curious about experiencing TCM, but luckily I didn’t really
need a doctor’s opinion in China until the second year I lived there. We’d just
moved to a rural city in Southwestern China, with different weather and different food. My skin
was not reacting well to the changes—and, distressingly, I’d picked up impetigo
from some of the children I was teaching. After an Internet self-diagnosis of
skin cancer (my self-diagnoses always include the worst possible interpretation
of symptoms), I asked a co-worker to take me to the
hospital across the road and see what a real doctor said.
At this hospital, and others I’ve been to since, when you come in to
register you pick whether you want to see a nurse for a few yuan, a nurse with
more experience for one yuan more, or a specialist doctor for a whopping seven yuan
(about a dollar at that time). Not one to skimp, I chose to visit the
specialist dermatologist.
The dermatologist had no waiting room; all of her patients grouped
together in her small office on stools and listened avidly to her diagnosis and
recommendation for the other patients while waiting for their names to be called.
When it was my turn ( I was extremely conscious of the ten pairs of ears and eyes in the room) the doctor didn’t ask me any questions other than if my skin
itched. I had my co-worker explain my difficulties but she simply nodded,
had me stick out my tongue, and made a note.
“Will you take TCM?” she asked me in Chinese.
“It’s not cancer?” I replied.
She laughed, and so did the other patients behind me.
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| A TCM store in Hong Kong. Photo by Brian Jeffery Beggerly. |
Relieved of that, at least, I said, “sure, why not?” and so began a
six-week course of TCM. The doctor explained that I would see results less
quickly than I would if we used Western medicine, but that hopefully I’d
experience better skin and more energy after using the TCM.
The treatment was in part restrictive: I had to limit my intake of spicy and oily food, milk products, sugar, and caffeine. I had to eat more green vegetables.
So far so good.
It included a topical treatment, which involved combining a paste with
the clear contents of a glass vial, stirring it, and then applying it daily to affected areas with a
delicate wooden stick. The glass vial was the most frustrating, because it
didn’t have a lid: you had to break the tiny top off of it without shattering
the rest of the vial and dropping glass shards in the paste; without dropping
it on the floor, smashing it and getting glass splinters all over the
bathroom; without cracking it and cutting your fingers. It took a few
times—and return visits to ask for more medicine—to get this right.
I was also told to up my vitamin intake, which I could thankfully do
with nice, comforting, Western-looking tablets.
And I had to drink four servings of a special brewed medicine every
day.
The prescription for all this medicine was several pages long, because
the doctor listed twenty-some ingredients.
I knew that the prescription was lengthy, but I didn’t realize what
exactly was in store for me until my co-worker and I went to the pharmacy
counter to pick up the medicines: three plastic shopping bags full of powders,
leaves, and twigs.
“Um, what do I do with this?” I asked my friend.
“You cook it,” she said.
Um, yeah.
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| Medicines before they are cooked. Photo by Bernhard Scheid. |
Luckily, the town had one pharmacy that catered to people who were as
incompetent as me in the medicine-preparation department and with a little
negotiating, the proprietors agreed to cook up and bag my medicine, even though I hadn’t
purchased the initial ingredients from them. It took them a day to prepare, but
soon I had about four gallons of a root beer colored drink, hermetically sealed
in several dozen small plastic baggies.
I was told to keep this refrigerated and drink it hot every day
under certain conditions that I forget now. To warm it up, it worked best if I
put a baggie in a bath of hot water for a few minutes, then snipped a corner off the
plastic and slurped it out in one foul-tasting go.
Or, sometimes I put it in a coffee cup and pretended I was drinking
really bad filtered coffee.
It was a fussy, bewildering way to find a cure, but the impetigo cleared
right up, and soon my skin was behaving itself too. I went back to the doctor
several more times, for more medicine, until finally she gave me the all-clear.
I have always wondered what was in the medicine she prescribed, but at
the end of the day, I’m just happy it worked.
What experiences have you had at foreign hospitals?
