Like a Pool Cue in a Meat Curtain

This past Friday marked the end of my first rotation at the Qin Huai TCM Hospital in Nanjing.  I can hardly believe I have been in China for two weeks now.  It doesn’t seem like that long and it seems like much longer at the same time.  I have had some opportunities to improve my free hand needling style which is somewhat different from home because of the frequent use of guide tubes, combined with the overall sensitivity of my patients back home, and the use of longer and at times thicker needles here.  The patients here, in China, have been very patient with my gradual improvement in needling.  At first it seemed really awkward using my fingers in a slightly new way and I felt like I was prodding and poking at people, a little too much, with the longer and thicker needle. Yet the patients here felt I wasn’t needling “strong” enough.  It is all about perspective and expectation, right?

The pool cue in a meat curtain felt like a particularly relevant, and admittedly irreverent, analogy for this new skill.  Guess you had to have been there.

Where to Store 1.4 Billion Medical Record?

In China it would appear that people keep their own medical records.  Every person who came in for acupuncture had a pamphlet sized book which they brought for the doctor to write in.  In addition to individuals keeping their own chart notes, they keep their own x-rays, x-ray reports and lab results.  They bring these items for the doctor if they are recent.  If there are no recent labs or imaging the doctor can send for patient to get these labs and have them return with the results.  This confused me for several days until I asked, as I had expected to see doctors drowning in paperwork. That wasn’t the case.  1.4 billions charts do not need to be stored in a remote vault in Northwestern China they can be stored at home with the people they belong to.

Burst Bubbles

I was in an acupuncture treatment room the other day with 14 people.  There were 4 people being treated, 1 doctor, 1 interpreter, 2 assistant doctors doing moxa, 3 student observers (I was one of them), and 3 other friends or family observers.  The thought I had to myself was; we could totally fit 5 more people in this room.  It isn’t because the room was big, but there wasn’t the same level of anxiety and discomfort that generally occurs back home when many people are in a small space and have things to do.  Nobody in the room seemed the least bit bothered about the number of people in the room, nobody ran into each other or swung the door open too hard and at that point I realized my 8-12 inch personal bubble had dissolved.