Same Day Service

One thing that continues to impress me on a near daily basis is the access that seemingly regular people have to medical imaging and labs. Any given day the doctor will interview a patient and prior to dispensing anything will send them down to go get a chest x-ray, abdominal ultrasound, brain scan or blood work and return to the very same doctor, on the same day, (or the next day if it is the evening) to finish the appointment. Just this morning the doctor sent a man for a brain scan and about 2 hours later him and his wife returned pictures and report in hand. I tried to explain to the interpreter the jaw dropping awe that overcomes us foreign interns when we see a person return, the same day, with their imaging and reports. All she had to say was; yes, it is very quick here.

Take Two of These and… Get Out of Here

Wednesday is the day we have afternoon lectures. The lecture this week was on classical formulas and the constitution types of people they treat. This was fascinating. During the break one of my colleagues asked the doctor what would be an appropriate formula for her. He felt her pulse looked at her tongue and poked her in the stomach a couple of times and told her. I inadvertently became the next unsuspecting volunteer for this particular diagnosis. After the same analysis and a strong prod in what I believe to be my dismayed gallbladder, he told me my formula. Additionally, he told me, I should travel more, drink jasmine and rose tea with lemon and listen to soft music. This was great news I am totally on board with this advice. Perhaps I can get a doctors note and a prescription for travel. I can handle some soft music and some flower teas. That night I even tried to follow my new prescription and settled with some rose tea, instead of soft music I watched men’s gymnastics in my hotel room.

Huang Shan Revisited

My original intention was to write a lovely post with pictures about the chaotic, magical, treacherous and beautiful Yellow Mountain.  However, on Saturday night I found myself unable to log into my blog or view anyone else’s blog.  Sometimes the internet behaves funny here but it has been several days and I feel personally censored. I have been told that this sometimes happens and I should keep checking back because these things can change.  So you will have to wait for pictures of Yellow Mountain or anything else until I reach a different internet climate.

The group and I fell into somewhat of a collective slump after our adventures on the mountain.  Some of us found ourselves eating potato chips, ice cream and chocolate and drinking coca cola to ease our internet woes and language barriers.  After a few familiar flavors we seem to be back on track.

We are in the first week of our second clinic rotation, which is a mix of writing herbs down at lightning speed and answering slightly awkward questions about learning Chinese Medicine without being fluent in Chinese and the significant differences in the educational process and the healthcare process.

With that said my Chinese comprehension is improving.  So much of the language is context based and there are so many sounds and dialects that I probably won’t be able to eves drop on any conversations in the near future.  It might be why, when people want to hear what you are saying here they will just stand next to you and listen.

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.

What’s your problem?

Today I learned that the word for problem and the word for question are the same in Chinese.  This made me laugh when I thought of my TCM instructors who were confused and somewhat dismayed by the number of “problems” we would have with the material.  They would tell us we wouldn’t have such “problems” if we just did our reading.  And it was troubling that we had so many “problems” in class, if we could just save them until after class it would be better.  Moral of the story is: one person’s question is another person’s problem and you wouldn’t have so many of either if you just do your reading.