i have to admit i’m fairly skeptical of traditional chinese medicine. the first time i was in china i took a day trip to suzhou and had a headache that was damn near crippling. after a couple hours i couldn’t stand it anymore and with one of my co-travellers went into a pharmacy to buy a remedy. they asked if i wanted chinese or western. i said i wanted the potent one. they gave me chinese. it tasted horrible, a truth i was to discover again and again about TCM, and, despite the claim i often hear about how TCM has no side effects, i had hiccups of nearly the same damn near crippling degree for at least the day if not longer. personally i’d have preferred the headache over the taste + hiccups.

anyone who thinks that burp and hiccup are in any way related as the chinese may suggest haven’t ever had crippling hiccups. it’s nothing like the “i drank my coke from mcdonalds too fast” relief of a good belch. but i digress.

though i’m trying to break myself of this idea, i tend to believe that TCM works largely on the placebo effect. of course it helps you. you expect that it will and psychologically i’d imagine a couple thousand years of its use is about as useful as an old man in a white lab coat telling you you’ll be ok. recently though i’ve really begun to hope that i’m wrong about this whole thing.

a study a while back by someone who’s been forgotten showed that prayer was only useful to the hospital patients who were aware that people were praying for them. for those who had no idea, it had no effect. this should come as no surprise to anyone with a grasp on rationality or for that matter anyone who’s really studied theology. god or no god, asking an omniscient benevolent divinity to spare your uncle with the drinking problem is probably going to have about as little of an effect on the outcome either way. bam. placebo effect.

but then my dog got sick and in order to keep the probably terminal illness from causing too much havoc on his nervous system, i combined 安宫牛黄 (i.e. antelope horn) with the usual neuro-cocktail prescribed by all the best vets in changzhou and shanghai.

i don’t doubt he knows he’s sick. the constantly twitching arm has got to have alerted him to the fact that something was amiss by now. but i’m also pretty sure he has no idea that any of the drugs we give him, from the daily injections of interferon to the dissolved vitamins and brain meds squirted in his mouth to the red-clay-tasting (that’d be the 牛黄) crap we hide in his beef sticks, are being given to him for any reason beyond the fact that i’m big, he’s little, and i can close doors.

the 牛黄 is about 150RMB for two days’ worth. it ain’t cheap. but i’m serious about trying to get him to beat this pretty fatal virus so i’m doing everything i can. but then if it really is a placebo effect, and he thinks i’m just an asshole, how can i really have much hope for it working? this is the reason i’m trying to change my mind on TCM. i think it’d be a lot easier if i had some idea of what was actually active in the different medicines. i know what naproxen sodium does. i know that acetominofen does little to help my body chemistry with pain. i also know what medicines i can find these drugs in and i know that too much of the latter will destroy your liver and kill you. how much eye of newt is toxic to a 2kg puppy? no one tells you these things.

the main reason i’m inclined to think it’s crap is what i hear time and time again by a number of those around me. “western medicine is good for immediate things but has side effects. any long-term problem you should take chinese medicine.” then ask them if they had cancer or aids which they’d choose. right. 西药 to the rescue.

i’ve said it before and i’ll surely say it again. i don’t care what opinions anyone has. all i want is for people to be able to give a reasonable explanation of why they have these ideas. “because it’s been in use for ages” doesn’t work when it’s coming from the same person who tells me my phone is emitting more toxic radiation when it’s only got one battery bar “because it has to work harder to get a signal” and that it’s more likely to give me brain cancer if i use it on the left side of my head over the right. or was it the other way around? right.

sorry one more. beds are aligned east-west because the earth’s radiation runs north-south or something like that so you’re less likely to get cancer if you sleep perpendicular to the radiation. all told to me with a straight if not honestly concerned face.

if anyone needs a vet recommendation in shanghai let me know. i’ve found a good one.