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Published: December 2nd 2013
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We arrived back in Nanning after an overnight in Kunming back at the same hotel we stayed at en route to Lijiang. Not sure where next, maybe Guilin in a few days but we will rest here for a day or two. I've had many requests for more photos from the thousands of people following this blog, but I can only post five with each entry and am too lazy to do multiple entries. Today I'll post a few more random ones, starting with the top-of-the-mountain pig roast at Haike village, which might just be my trip highlight so far. I can hear kindergarten kids laughing and screaming with play just outside Jinyi's condo here. There are tropical plants everywhere and it's five or so degrees warmer than where we have been. I'm posting a small piece I wrote on the train yesterday re. Jinyi's treatment of her son's asthma after a failed five-year course of antibiotics. Sort of a statement about her character, but also an introduction to the world of Chinese traditional diets and medicines.
That's it for now, from Nanning.
David
A Mother’s Medicine in China When Jianwei Hong was
one and a half years old, he coughed a lot and wet his pants more than other children. He was a weak and sickly child. His mother, Hong Jinyi, took him to the hospital at least once a month when his coughing became acute. At the hospital, the doctors gave him antibiotics intravenously. He was also given the asthmatic puffing devices that teenagers in North America use extensively for lung allergies or asthma.
Although each of these treatments produced good temporary relief of an asthmatic attack, such relief was short-lived. He was tested on a breathing device by an asthmatic specialist when he was six, and the expert diagnosed Jianwei as having a severe asthmatic condition. The expert asked for an extra 800 Chinese dollars for strong antibiotics and for regular monitoring, but the symptoms kept recurring on a regular basis. When he caught a cold, it often developed quickly into an asthmatic attack, usually in the first two days from the onset of the cold.
When he was about nine years old, and with no improvement over time, Hong Jinyi talked to her son about his condition. She had seen a news report about a boy who
was asthmatic who had been kidnapped. The mother begged the kidnappers to supply her son with his antibiotic medicine. Hong Jinyi told her son this story and said she feared that if he was ever in any kind of crisis that deprived him of his medicine he would be the first to die. She asked her son if he would trust her to find their own solution to his condition. Her plan was to stop the western medicine because she had seen him grow weaker and weaker every year. She said she would substitute a traditional Chinese diet for strengthening his lungs, supplemented by certain Chinese medicines.
To begin with, Hong Jinyi bought pork, pig’s lungs, and pears, traditional foods for strengthening the lungs. She fried these ingredients in a ceramic wok so that she could build a soup from these ingredients. From these she made a soup and fed it to her son as soon as he developed a cold or as soon as asthmatic symptoms developed. Jianwei had always been a healthy eater, and he particulary liked a salted porridge that had lily and lotus seeds mixed in with porridge rice. She also encouraged her son to
drink a lot of water. He did this diligently.
In addition, there was medicine. She gave her son a mixture of fritillary root, pear, and raw sugar to make a tea. If she had time, she mixed another tea called lohanguo (made from a herb called Momordica Grosvenor mixed with chrsysanthemum) in place of the first tea mixture. Finally, she gave Jianwei medicine that mixed fritillary and pipa fruit (loquat) to ease coughing during an attack.
Hong Jinyi had talked with him about his condition and explained that he was getting worse, not better, after at least five years of intensive antibiotics. She told her son she had watched a mother on television beg with the men who had kidnapped her son: he was on a similar regime of heavy antibiotic interventions and she had said her son would die if he didn’t get his medicine. Hong Jinyi told Jianwei that she feared he was so weak that he would die if anything extreme happened to him. Jianwei listened and agreed to trust his mother’s new program. Even though he had several major asthmatic episodes in these first months, with extreme coughing and feverish
symptoms, his mother never took him to the hospital.
What she did do was implement the new diet immediately and intervene with her traditional herbal remedies at the first signs of a cold or coughing episode. After three months, his symptoms began to decline, and when they did appear, Jianwei’s symptoms began to be more manageable so long as Hong Jinyi could provide her traditional remedies quickly. By the time Jianwei was eleven, his asthmatic attacks had become infrequent. Jianwei is now almost 17 and has become a tall, thin young man. His health appears to be normal, and he can run with his classmates in one kilometer runs without being winded or developing any breathing-related symptoms.
When Hong Jinyi looks back at her experience, she says that after seven years of treatment she knew her son was getting worse, not better, using the western drugs for which she had to pay extra money. (In the west, during this same period, physicians had recognized the folly of the recommended practices of the last part of the twentieth century, when antibiotics were administered with the same abandon for almost any infection, and these western doctors had adopted a far more cautious approach to administering these drugs.)
Hong Jinyi today emphasizes that she was operating more on instinct than on science when she implemented her new regime. She says she didn’t really know what she was doing and had to talk to herbalists and traditional doctors along the way. She knew, for example, that white vegetables were good for strengthening the lungs, but beyond some general guidelines, she was operating in the dark.
She knows her son may simply have grown up enough to leave his asthma behinds. But in her heart she doesn’t believe this: she believes that her intuitions were right—though she also believes there was luck involved as well—and that in her son’s case at least, the western approach was wrong and the traditional, herbal approach was right.
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