in response to a well received prodding

A friend of mine posted this on her blog the other day:
"I'm secretly hoping that by linking to her very outdated blog, my friend will get the hint that she needs to start blogging again."
She posted it on fb, too... so I've been willingly prodded back into blogging by a belovéd friend.

(and I thought no one was reading!)

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The other day, that same friend of mine and I were talking about health and China. What is it about Chinese people, she wondered. Well educated, intelligent, experienced though they may be, they still believe in these crazy 'old wives' tales' about health. Why is that?

A good question, for which I can only provide a partial answer.

What do you do when you get a stomach ache? What makes you feel better? For many Westerners, the answer is either a fizzy drink (e.g. Sprite, ginger ale, coke) or a bowl of broth. Chicken broth. (Or Campbell's chicken soup from a can.) Why? Is there some sort of healing quality in bubbles or broth? Some people claim that it's the syrup in coke that makes you feel better, but then why does ginger ale help?

My theory-- it's comforting b/c Mom told you it would be. Mom said, "here, have a Sprite. It will make your tummy feel better," and surprisingly enough, it did. Be it the sugar, the 'clear liquid' idea, the keeping hydrated... whatever it is, Mom said it would make you feel better, you believed her, and it worked. (Could it just be the placebo effect??)

Now take what sounds like an old wives' tale and apply the same principle. Here's a good one: after you give blood, you should not use the computer, listen to anything with headphones, or use your cell phone for at least 2 days. (It's something about radiation...) Some friends of mind in NE China told me that. They were sworn off all their forms of "indoor entertainment" by whoever it was that took their blood, and they took these things very seriously. Why? Because just like Mom, the doctor had told them that those things would make them feel worse. Best to just rest, don't read too much and strain your eyes, and drink some hot water. The rest and hot water made them feel better in part because they were told it would, and they believed what they were told.

Now let me add a new layer.

Many (not all) Chinese people seem to have many fears with regards to health. One of their greatest fears-- or at least one that I heard about most-- was to 着凉 zhao liang. The liang is this concept of "the cold" or "coldness", and zhao liang usually gets translated to catching "the cold" inside your body. (This, incidentally, explains why Chinese people love the English phrase "I caught a cold" b/c they think it means the same thing as zhao liang. Westerners mean a virus, Chinese mean the liang.) The liang is easy to catch-- don't drink enough hot water, eat too many 'cold foods' (like watermelon), don't wear enough clothing or a scarf around your neck, and you can catch the liang inside. Then, all sorts of problems can erupt.

Once you've zhao-ed the liang it's hard to tell what the symptoms will be. You could get cold or flu like symptoms, and those will induce the average Chinese person to make a dash to the hospital for an I.V. An I.V. is the way these things are treated in China. They're so common, a friend of mine once joked about going to the hospital in China like this:
"Why are you hear without an iv?"
"Well, I'm just visiting a friend..."
"It does not matter; you must have an iv..."
Why an I.V.? Because it's a quick fix. It makes you feel better, if not sometimes temporarily, and people are desperate to get better quickly. Why so desperate? Because in a country where you can be called "doctor" at a hospital after 4 years of undergraduate and where doctors are paid by all sorts of medicine companies to peddle their remedies, people are fearful that no one knows what they're doing. They're afraid that they could die from a cold or the flu, and that's possible in a place where TB is still endemic. And with some of them old enough to remember hospital experiences like those portrayed in To Live, their fear is unsurprising.

You see, while Westerners see a kid with a fever and give him Tylenol, or they get a backache and grab a couple Ibuprofen, Easterners, or at least Chinese, do not yet have the familiarity with over-the-counter drugs the West does. They don't trust doctors (with good reason, as you can read above), they don't trust medicine (usually herbal and not so useful in the dosages given), and they don't trust so-called "Western medicine" (pills like Tylenol and Ibuprofen), as Westerners are often seen as a bunch of pill-poppers (again, with good reason). BUT, with nothing left to trust, they are fearful. (Remember, they also don't have a Father watching over them, so there really is no one, in their minds, that can cure them.) So what do they do? They cling, tightly, to sometimes non-sensical old wives' tales about not using the computer while pregnant or about drinking hot water to cure acne because it's all they have, and it makes them feel better, even when it's not actually going to cure anything.

But to be honest, these days, I find there's something comforting in a cup of hot water...