Medicinal Gunk

Olga drinking tea - students made the paper roses

My Russian friend Olga and I met as usual this Friday afternoon, even though our dear tutor is off in Chengdu today, competing with thousands of other Chinese graduates on an exam for prospective civil servants. A small fraction of the test-takers will be invited to interview for an even smaller number of job openings. We wish Xiaodan the best. Competition is fierce.

As a graduate student, Xiaodan both teaches and tutors Chinese.

Xiaodan will no doubt tell Olga and me all about her views of the exam system next week. We've already discussed--to the degree my limited vocabulary allows it--her views about job hunting and working conditions for young people in China.

Today, though, Olga and I told each other stories--in Chinese--about our week. Without a doubt, the highlight of my week was fetching my brother Ted and his wife Cathy from a hotel in Chongqing and bringing them back to Beibei for a day. They regaled me with tales of their travels, from ancient monasteries in the desert northwest to the cold splendor of Tibet in the southwest, filled me in on family news, and traipsed around the university with me in Beibei, getting a taste of my life here.

If seeing Ted and Cathy was the best thing that happened, though, meeting two old men in the park below my apartment was the weirdest thing. The park is full of mostly older people doing taijiquan most mornings and it wasn't unusual to have someone come up and stare at me as I cut through on my way to classes. Curiosity kept me from shaking off one elderly man who seized my wrist, took my pulse and within seconds put his finger in two places, creating some noticeable warmth. (He was small enough I could have thrown him if I took a mind to--I wasn't threatened and don't under ordinary circumstances let people touch me. I had no intention of paying him for whatever service he thought he was providing.) He then slapped a piece of paper (below) with some medicinal gunk on my back, which was a bit of a feat, given that I was wearing a coat and two shirts. I did at that point shrug him off and "mei you'd" him when his notebook with fees came out. Sitting on rocks nearby, watching, were the folks from whom I regularly buy vegetables.

Later that morning, when a woman from Malawi in my Chinese class offered to help wash it off my back, the classmate with a PhD from Suriname said it looked just like a poultice her mother makes. Even after we had peeled the paper off and scrubbed most of the tar-like gunk off my back, enough of the gunk was left on the paper that, when the paper was placed in my notebook, it bled through to the other side. My back looks somewhat similar.

Even later, when I was talking with some Chinese students in my English classes, they smelled it and earnestly told me that the tar-like gunk is very good for you, even though only one could speculate what it is made out of. That student, who said her mother is a doctor, thought it was made from boiled donkey hide. Others told me about the pain relief such gunk provides.

My sense is that nearly all of my Chinese friends, including MDs, are respectful of Chinese medical practices, even if they also--even primarily--use Western ones. The same doctor may offer both Eastern and Western diagnoses and therapies. Hospitals, too.

The men in the park were something close to charlatans and many herbal remedies have no evidence-based support--and yet I suspect that among the mostly-benign-but-useless treatments are many treatments the West would benefit from learning more about. At the very least we should be willing to research them, and I suspect we have something to learn from a much more holistic perspective of health.  Even if most of these treatments, some millennia-old, are useless, I find utterly amazing that some seem to work spectacularly well. Evidence seems to be mounting that acupuncture, for instance, works in particular contexts (see http://newsinhealth.nih.gov/issue/feb2011/feature1 ).

Without the benefit of many contemporary research tools, imagine the path of discovery for these ancient Chinese medical practitioners. Hen youisi.