Buckland Weekly #24: medicine

As always with these posts the contents are solely the view of the author and should not be taken to be officially endorsed in any way by the company..

Medicine

You will get sick. It might be a headache. It might be sickness, diarrhea or constipation. It might be a bad head cold. One way or another you will get sick because everybody, everywhere gets sick sometimes. If you were back home you would get sick sometimes. The difference is that back home you would know exactly what to do about it. You would know what medicines you needed and where to get them. You would know whether you needed to see a doctor and how to do it. You would be able to describe you symptoms and understand the diagnosis and treatment. You would know how sick you had to be to justify phoning your boss to say you were taking the day off. You would know the consequences of taking the day off.

Here you probably won't know any of that.

Now, before I go into anything else about medicine in China let me state my own position up front. I believe in evidence based medicine. I am with Tim Minchin who said, “Do you know what we call alternative medicine that's been proven to work? Medicine.” And with whoever first said, “the plural of anecdote is not data.” However you are free to believe whatever you want to believe. I'm not going to try to convince you because I know from experience that it would be a frustrating and ultimately futile exercise.

The reason that it's important to know where I stand is that, from my point of view, most traditional forms of Chinese medicine are either not proven to work or – worse – proven not to work as soon as they are looked at scientifically. If you are a believer then you will counter with, “If they have been doing it for thousands of years, it must be true.” Our viewpoints are irreconcilable.

So, getting back to the topic at hand, what will you do when you are sick?

The first thing that will happen is that your Chinese friends will start offering all kinds of well-meant advice. It will range from “Your stomach upset is because you drink cold water” to “you were walking around your apartment with no shoes” to “you are sick because eating donkey meat has brought back an old illness”.

They will then want you to undergo acupuncture or cupping or consult a Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioner who will give you bags of leaves and stones to boil into a healing drink. Actually that's only the very traditional practitioners. Modern practitioners working in a traditional way will give you things that look like western pills or medicines but have been prepared from traditional sources. They may look like western medicines but they aren't.

If you wish to follow your friends' advice, go right ahead. Whether they cure you or not they are unlikely to do very much harm and most minor ailments cure themselves anyway. If you have a cough or a cold most western medicines do nothing either beyond making you feel a bit better because you have taken something – anything – that promises to help. For colds and such I just put some honey and lemon into hot water, purely because it helps to soothe a sore throat, not because I think it will cure me. I know that I'll be better in a few days regardless of what I do.

What do you do if you decide that Chinese traditional methods are not for you; that you want the medicines you are familiar with? There is good news and bad news. You are extremely unlikely to find western branded medicines here. If your preferred headache medicine is Tylenol, forget it. Night Nurse for your cold? Sorry. Imodium for... er, well no Imodium either. Unbranded medications on the other hand can be sometimes be obtained. You might not get Advil but you can get Ibuprofen which is the same thing. And if you really need that Tylenol then Paracetamol is the same thing although it's a little harder to find. Western medications for those stomach problems are more difficult and probably only available in big cities so bringing some with you is probably a good idea.

If you want western medicine, when you go to the pharmacy it's as well to take a Chinese friend with you and to look up first the active ingredient name of your medication, then the Chinese for it, on the internet before you go. If you want Chinese medicine still take a friend as they can explain the symptoms.

There is another complication. Drugs which are prescription only in our countries are often available over the counter here but that little leaflet that tells you all the possible side effects is in Chinese. I recommend checking the internet again. When I injured my hip the pharmacy gave my Chinese friend some Diclofenac*. When I looked up the warnings they said that it can cause serious internal bleeding and added “(rarely fatal)”. Call me a wimp if you wish but “rarely fatal” isn't nearly as rare as I'd like. I didn't take it.

OK. Moving on. What about more serious things? What if, as I did, you slip on some ice, crack your patella and break your finger? What if you need to be in hospital for a few days? First of all, don't panic. Chinese hospitals may not always look as shiny and new as western ones but the medical care standards are good. They will almost certainly treat you using western medicines and techniques. However there are a couple of things you should know, just so that they don't come as a surprise. First is that the don't usually administer drugs by injection – it's usually by IV. What would be two seconds at home has you sitting in a chair or lying on a bed for an hour here. It's just the way it's done.

Second, if you need to spend a few days in hospital, they do not provide meals. There is usually somewhere on the premises where food can be bought but that's not much use when you are in plaster ankle to hip. If you want to eat you rely on visitors to bring you food and it can be quite disconcerting (not least to the sense of smell) if you are in a ward with other people to watch them eating all kinds of things while you have no visitors and no food.

And the final thing you should know is that your school is likely to want you back in the classroom and working far quicker than you would be at home. When I had my accident THREE DAYS later the school was providing taxis to and from my apartment, a wheel chair between classrooms and a student as a teaching assistant to write things on the board for me.

You may be wondering about medical insurance. I will post separately about that later.

(*Is it just me or does "Diclofenac" look the name of an alien race in the modern era of Doctor Who? - "They are the most dangerous race in the Universe - the Diclofenac!")