Chinese Medicine

These small businesses can be found on most streets and certainly in every neighborhood in China. As of yet, no major conglomerate has got its hands on the traditional medicine market and monopolized it, so the format of these shops vary distinctly between family owned shacks passed down through generations, to a wall of shelves in a modern, western style pharmacy.What distinguishes all of them however is the musty smell of bark, fungus and dried sea creatures, and the characteristic huge open bags and glass pots of matter, unrecognizable to an unknowing eye.  The reason this industry’s potential has not been tapped and monopolized like the majority of China’s transitioning economy, is its age and increasing outdatedness in the modernizing nation. The practice and theories of traditional medicine have been developed over 5000 years, but that does not stop modern science and newer generations from gradually discarding it. This is largely due to the fact that Chinese traditional medicine and its effects on the human body cannot be medically proven, and it can therefore not be recognized within a scientific paradigm. The practice was derived from ancient Taoist philosophy, which emphasizes the link between humans and nature. ‘Tao’ can actually be described as meaning balance, natural order, or flow of the universe. Once this is considered the route of development for traditional Chinese medicine becomes obvious; for example natural materials are often used to cure ailments and acupuncture is believed to help clear the meridians (energy points found in various places in the body) so that your natural energy can be channeled more effectively. The problem is that the results of these treatments cannot be proven through science, since the treatment is of more of a spiritual nature. It is, for instance, very difficult for a scientist to detect the existence of energy points within the body when they are not made up of molecules and are not visible in x-rays etc, something of great importance to a factually inclined medical mind.

The methods of natural medicines are also at odds with modern science because they are prescribed to ease the source of your problem, not its symptom.  For example, if you have a headache, Western doctors would prescribe paracetamol in order to remove the superficial pain. For Taoists however, it is the source of the pain which must be treated, in order to restore ones natural balance, so stress or disturbed energy flow would instead be diagnosed and treated. Since there is no way to measure stress level or energy flow, the effect of the medicine cannot be documented regardless of its effectiveness. Whilst in Hong Kong I decided to get some first hand experience, to enable me to validly side my opinion with either the Taoists or skeptics. With a few strange looks but a very welcoming young Chinese pharmacist I entered a shop which was of half western half Chinese medicinal format. Like all Chinese medicinal shops there was row upon row of glass pots containing brown, white, yellow and grey ambiguous objects, those distinguishable to me being; roots, bark, seeds, fruit, fungus, squid, nuts and leaves. The young male pharmacist spoke about them with the intelligence and clarity of an educated scientist.  He explained to me, among other things, that the huge pile of dried seahorses were prescribed if your ‘Yin’ was imbalanced to your ‘Yang’ energy, a side effect of which could be chronic fatigue or throat problems. When I asked if I could try something he promptly wrote me a prescription for ‘Qui Pi Soup’, a medicine to counters sleeping problems and forgetfulness by encouraging better digestion and blood circulation. At a negotiated price of about £7 I agreed, albeit with some confusion over his accurate diagnosis and knowledge of my personal problems. I was then handed a prescription written entirely in Cantonese, leaving me with even less of an idea of what matter I was to consume. When he then busily started laying the ingredients out on a brown sheet of paper I recognized it as a couple of grams of different varieties of bark, a pile of seeds, some dried fruit and very thin sheets and shavings of wood.

The young man nodded in acknowledgement and added that ‘they were from trees in the forests of China’.  He instructed that the ingredients were to be taken home and boiled for 45 minutes until the water had soaked up all the valuable qualities of the substances, and enough for 2 bowls of soup remained in the pot. Then one should be drunk at night and one in the morning, with generous amounts of sugar. Later, when it came to drinking the Qui Pi Soup I understood his sniggering insistence on the intake of sugar alongside the medicine. It tasted like what it was; essentially a tree boiled down to soup. It was a thick brown liquid which tasted very earthy but also sickly sweet, presumably from the fruits, the combined texture, smell and taste of which made me have to literally force down every sip, with a few gags in-between. Despite this, I finished the whole bowl at both occasions and can safely say that the effect was minimal.I had a good night’s sleep and was not particularly forgetful that day but whether this was down to the medicine remains like so many aspects of this ancient practice, scientifically unproven and unknown.  So my rather fruitless attempt to assess the validity of traditional Chinese medicine in fact portrays its largest contemporary problem; an inability to be understood or proven in modern society, which lacks patience and faith in what is not material in nature. It is a unique case however, because China has also managed to demonstrate that the often opposing forces of science and spiritualism need not be in competition, but can be combined to produce optimum results, with occasional cases of traditional Chinese medicine being prescribed alongside conventional treatments, to, for example, ease the side effects of chemotherapy and help withdrawal symptoms from drug abuse. Although the influence of traditional medicine is certainly diminishing, its continued existence, however small, should inspire optimism since it is evidence of some remaining faith in methods have been developed, tried and tested over centuries and the medicinal properties of nature.

To make up your own mind, check out Starhouse Chinese Herbal Medicine in Leeds, 5-7 Harewood street.