medicine

Getting sick is a humbling experience!

Again, I got a good reminder last week before I flew to Taipei to lead a session in an open source conference. I felt tired and powerless with a some fever and a lousy appetite. The feeling of hopelessness was unbearable. It was even probable that I have to cancel my trip Monday if I were not well enough or if I had high fever. You don't want to be quarantined in a foreign country when you cannot pass that thermal detection passage way ;-) in the airport. I checked the web on different symptoms of cold, flu, heat stroke and even the Avian flu.

It is probably interesting to have a quick comparison between a Chinese OTC (over the counter) drugstore and that in the United States. A typical Chinese OTC drugstore has actually a behind-the-counter setup. You walk in and tell them what your problems are, and they'll recommend a couple of things for you. You counter with some questions and you get a slip to pay the cashier and come back to pick up your medicine. These medicines can be completely composed of herbal ingredients or sometimes complete anti-biotics with its chemical name. Their names and labels tell you the basic what they'll do for you, but the more detailed information sheet is often *inside* the box.

In a typical "Walgreen" drugstore in California, you don't get advices normally since the people there are not trained to give any advices, and most places would not volunteer to do this because of possible liability issue. The setup is surely "over the counter", and you don't need to ask to see the package like the Chinese counterpart which are shelved behind the counter. I see one counter example in Yunnan when I was looking for a "Visine"-like eye drop early July. That store is more like a Walgreen store; you pick up what you need and line up at the checkout line. That store has very few choices as far as OTC medicines go. In this contrast, Chinese drugstore gives you the imagery of an old-fashioned apothecary in the West. I heard that modern-day French pharmacies are more like the Chinese ones as far as giving medical advices go.

Here is a sample of my medicine supplies with everything noted. Compare yours with mine



* Lovastatin 10mg: from Kaiser from my cholesterol
* Triple Flex: mythical knee drug from Nature Made/Costco
* Tussin DM : generic cough syrup which I hope not to use ever from Kirkland/Costco
* Imodium: for running stomach which I used a couple of times already
* Chinese cold soothing medicine which cuts off the onset of cold symptoms and is packaged as dried power.
* Chinese fever lowering and detoxification medicine which comes in the package of 10ml liquid in thin glass tubes.

I thought of this topic at the peak of my suffering in Beijing and finished this in Taipei. The pharmacies in Taipei is more like those in the US and you don't find as many Chinese medicines when compared with the ones in Beijing. The mainland Chinese did a lot of work in Chinese herbal medicine in the last 50-60 years.

One last note is that of the different attitudes towards 'cold' between Chinese and Americans. In the US, unless you have evidences of bacteria infections, it is typical to have the approach 'have good rest, take lots of liquid, and call your doctor in the morning if necessary'. In the Chinese setting, people tend to tackle the symptoms like fever and sore throat aggressively, and often at the expenses of using anti-biotics without much discrimination. Having symptoms making people uneasy and people rarely vieGetting sick is a humbling experience!w that those symptoms are just natural course of viral cycle which cannot be avoided, but can be contained and minimized. To my friends, I often cite the danger of ineffectiveness to certain anti-biotics if exposed too many times