Two Cure-Alls to Everything

Before I moved to China IVs were something only the seriously ill got when they were hospitalized and hot water was something my grandmothers drank sometimes in the evening when they weren't in the mood for tea. To be honest, I don't think I've ever had an IV in my life! (Unless I was too little at the time to remember it.) And while I don't drink cold water outside of the summertime, I don't find hot water particularly appealing - just the opposite really!

Since moving to China, however, I've learned that IVs aren't just for the legitimately ill and hot water is not the occasional drink of the elderly. No sir! If you have a cold that lasts more than 2 or 3 days, what do you need? An IV. Want to pull an all-nighter or two to do some extra studying? Get an IV. Doctor tells you that you have a serious lung issue and need to be on medication for a week or more? Of course you're supposed to call off work so that you can rest...and so that you can trudge through the hazy wintertime smog to the hospital every day to take your medicines via IV.

And then there's the hot water! Have a sniffle? Drink hot water. Coughing? Drink hot water. Just not feeling well in general? Drink hot water. Serious lung illness? Drink hot water. Medicine, sure, yeah. (As long as it's being received via IV!) But hot water first and foremost! It doesn't matter if it's barely filtered tap water - something you really just shouldn't drink here - it will help you get or stay healthy.

All in all being sick here in Harbin has been a very interesting experience. I used to find it tiresome when people told me what to do when I got a bad cold, mostly because I was already doing all the things they would recommend and then some. But now I find the recommendations immensely narrowed down to just two things, and suddenly I'm much more grateful for friends elsewhere who at least researched effective ways to deal with illness instead of repeating mantras about the benefits of hot (versus room temperature) water and medication that's just as effective taken orally as it is via an IV drip.

I'm told it's the same elsewhere in China, so if you're considering a move to this great country, be prepared! If you move here, you will be told to drink more hot water to cure X, Y, or Z. Your Chinese friends will think you're weird for not running off to the hospital to get an IV drip after being sick for a day or two. And after being told this the first three or four times you will have to fight the urge to roll your eyes whenever you get advised to drink more hot water or get an IV! Not a deal breaker to be sure, but an annoyance to be ready for all the same. And a good reminder perhaps to be grateful to have the opportunity to live in a country with decent medical care available and the means to heat water!

On Medicine in the PRC

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!