This may well be the first of several posts on Chinese medicine and hospitals and whatnot as I explore their variegated, unexpected wonders thanks to recently being diagnosed with an illness that is apparently responsible for about 4 million deaths annually around the globe. Exciting, eh? I thought so too! I would be lying if I said I wasn't regretting not getting my will set in stone when I had the chance last summer, but hindsight and all of that. But we digress! Onward!
So, medicine. I've read enough about antibiotic-resistant bacteria and whatnot that when I get sick - a cold, say - I first of all fight it by sleeping more, drinking more water and honeyed ginger tea, eating raw garlic, gargling with salt water, and sometimes taking whatever herbal medicines seem appropriate and are available to me where I'm living. That usually does the trick. But then there are those times when a cold almost goes away, and then comes back...and then comes back again, but with a vengeance. A lingering cough lingers so long it becomes background noise instead of the cause for concern it should be. Or whatever the symptoms are for whatever the illness! You get the picture. When things reach that point - as they did for me recently, when I woke up one morning and realized I really, truly wasn't well - I go to the doctor so that they can figure out what's going on and give me medicine (something beyond raw garlic or an herbal tea) to fix the problem.
And that's what I did here. I found a friend to translate and traipsed off to a hospital recommended to me by my work and attached to a well known local university to get checked out. (Well, traipsed might sound a bit too cheery. I actually dragged myself onto a bus and then clung to its handrails for half an hour before getting to my stop and trudging another 20 minutes down the road to the hospital, the whole while feeling like dehydrated death warmed over since I'd been told not to drink anything in case there were blood tests.) And they did check me out - a basic exam, CT scan, blood tests, the works as far as I'm concerned. (And all for only ¥343.60/$55.36, which feels like a lot here, but really isn't when you've lived in the USA.) The doctor found the issue (described to me in translation as "severe"), prescribed me three medicines to take for a couple of days before a second checkup to assess my progress, and sent me off to buy them and go home and rest.
Except rest didn't come. The coughing fits became more severe and the fever worsened despite my religious taking of all the medicines prescribed at the designated times. And then I discovered that two of my three medicines weren't actually medicines, they were herbal remedies! (Thank goodness the main medicine I was prescribed to fight my illness actually was medicine.) Now I don't know about you, but as I indicated above, herbal medicine is what I take before things get serious. When I'm diagnosed with a "severe" illness, I assume the doctor will prescribe me serious medicine! I'm embarrassed to say it took me most of my time home between diagnosis day and my progress checkup to figure out why I was feeling worse and not better.
I'm not going to take this one experience at one hospital in one city in this rather large country as the norm, but I know that I will be much more cautious and much more questioning the next time I see a doctor here! And I would advise you to be too. Coming from North America, I never would have even thought to ask a doctor in a reputable hospital whether the medicines they were prescribing were actually medicines or untested herbal remedies. In my mind those are what I go to my witch doctor for, not the hospital! "Better safe than sorry" - words to live by!
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