Maybe you have heard of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) or Chinese herbal medicine. The good things you heard are probably that it is all natural and can really help. The bad things you heard about it is that they are poaching rhinos and tigers for medicinal purposes.
Granted, I am a western person and I don't understand the cultural significance of Chinese traditional medicine but it is just so odd to me.
When I talked to my Chinese co-workers about herbal medicine they all seemed to have a different answer as to what I needed for my cold. Even people who practice herbal medicine in China all have different answers as to what is needed. It seems from doctor to doctor they have a different idea of what is good and bad. Because it is. Because there isn't a standard of what actually works. After thousands of years, only recently have there been studies to see the effects of Chinese herbal medicine and most of it was inconclusive (Traditional Chinese Medicine: In Depth).
Not to mention that there is this strange idea (for me-in my Western perspective) of cold and hot foods and beverages. I literally had this conversation the other day.
"Chelsea, are you sick?"
"Yeah, I have the cold."
"Did you drink cold water?"
"Yeah, I always drink it cold."
"Well, that's it! Don't you know the the cold energy sucks your life force out?"
"...What?"
There is a philosophy in China that everything must be balanced, and if it isn't balanced then something bad will happen to you. If you get sick, well then your temperature of your food that you ate must not have been 50% cold and 50% hot!
According to this site it doesn't always mean temperature hot-some foods are labeled "hot" if they have lots of calories and those with low calories are labeled "cold."
Once a woman in my school fainted. When they were helping her back up one of the first questions they asked her was, "Did you eat ice cream last night?" When she replied yes they all nodded their heads and said, "Well, that explains it!"
Me-
These things...are not related?
I have also had a local tell me that drinking water while eating, at any temperature, makes you fat. Let me repeat that drinking water something with zero calories, fats, and sugars, while eating makes you fat. Which explains why I'm the only person in my school that brings a water bottle with them to lunch.
What is frustrating for me is the fact that even doctors in hospitals seem to believe in this too. Last year a co-worker fractured her ankle and the first doctor she went to (she chose to get a second opinion)
1. Did not give her a cast
2. Told her she was fine but then said if it was sprained or fractured
3. Buy a beef hip, boil it, and drink the contents.
His years of medical practice and experience and he chose to not give her any pain medicine or pills to help with the ankle but to drink.beef.bone.broth.
It is frustrating to me that so many people still believe in this medicine even though there are scientific studies saying that it doesn't work. Also, the fact that some of these people are making animals endangered because of how much they think that eating rhino horns makes them feel better instead of taking an arthritis pill from the pharmacy.
Granted, I will say this much about American health-it is nowhere near perfect. We are in the middle of an opioid epidemic caused by doctors over-prescribing pain killers. I'm sure that our culture of medicine seems just as odd and destructive to other countries. Again, I am a western person living in China so I don't understand the complexities of every cultural aspect.
But dang nab it is so hard to find cough drops here but it is really easy to find dried turtles to use as medicine.
Read more about the science of herbal medicine here.
Traditional Chinese Medicine: In Depth. (2018, July 16). Retrieved October 25, 2018, from https://nccih.nih.gov/health/whatiscam/chinesemed.htm
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