4000 Years of Chinese Traditional Medicine
Don’t tell anyone, but I’m on a diet. You could call it the “iPhone diet” because I’m using one of the many applications (iTunes link) for my iPhone to track daily calorie intake.
My plan is to eat whatever I want while accurately recording everything, which will help me identify the stuff I’ve been eating that’s the most harmful. To help me out, my wife bought some bad-tasting medicine, saying, “Now, this is kampo, so it will definitely work.”
A word that literally means “Chinese way,” kampo refers to the traditional herbal medicine of China, and it occupies an almost mythical place in the minds of the Japanese, in effect being a complete class of medical science that’s separate from Western medicine.
Many products, from energy drinks to various “enhancers” to Yomeshu (a kind of medicinal sake loaded with Chinese herbs) advertise themselves as making use of the magical power of kampo to relieve symptoms. Many kampo medicines have the full backing of the medical community here, and health insurance even covers them.
In the U.S., however, traditional Chinese medicines are completely ignored by almost every major company.
It’d be interesting if there were some really effective drugs sitting right under our noses that have been in use in China for thousands of years.
TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) is really awesome and really interesting except for the fact that none of it works. There is absolutely no reputable scientific evidence supporting any of it.
Some of my favorites TCM gems:
1. Eating powdered deer antlers gives you a raging ______ because deer antler looks like a hard penis. Logical, no? China traded the Khmer Rouge thousands of guns for Cambodian deer antlers, which helped fund Pol Pot’s genocide.
2. There is no scientific evidence supporting acupuncture, 拔罐 ba guan (cupping), or scraping your skin off with a metal spoon (another common Chinese medical practice).
3. Qi flows in and out of your stomach, therefore placing an herbal patch on your stomach will allow the medicine’s qi to flow into your qi, through the bellybutton.
4. Drinking cold liquids is mortally dangerous and the cause of every ailment from the common cold to cancer.
5. A ceiling fan chops up the air so that no human can breathe it. This gives you bad qi and if you sleep under a ceiling fan, you can suffer “fan death”. This is mortally dangerous.
6. Sharks rarely get cancerous-looking tumors, therefore eating shark fin makes you cancer proof.
7. The more exotic and endangered an animal is, the more powerful it’s “qi”. Therefore you must kill it, grind up and ingest it’s gall bladder and penis, so you can steal it’s “qi”. Remember there used to be tigers in China?
If people want to believe in this stuff, fine with me. I’ll stick with 21st Century science.
September 17th, 2008 at 7:51 amThis story was originally posted over my name by mistake. Please note it was written by Peter Payne.
September 17th, 2008 at 8:21 amWOW! I didn’t know yomeshu was covered. Now I can drink all I want!
September 22nd, 2008 at 1:45 amThose medicine tastes and smells terrible, though.
September 22nd, 2008 at 7:49 amI think many companies are actually making the medicines in packages nowadays.