Advertisement
Taking Blood Pressure
The doctor that we shadowed. That patient that she was seeing was complaining of swollen feet.6/18/10
This was a fairly uneventful day, so I will include two days into this blog entry. Also, the days earlier this week before this entry were mainly centered on our classes. The lectures we had included China’s medical care system and its reform, causes of disease and diagnosis, HIV/AIDS prevention, Chinese medicine theory and meridians, introduction to TCM herbal medicine, and Chinese birth control policy. If you have any questions about these topics, feel free to ask!
Today we signed up for departments from which we would shadow a doctor. I signed up for Internal Medicine along with Grayson and Kat. The other departments were Massage, Acupuncture, and Pediatrics. Massage and Acupuncture sounded interesting to me as well, but I thought Internal Medicine would be interesting to see from a TCM point of view. It also seemed more relevant to my future career since I am not planning on becoming a masseuse or an acupuncturist.
Grayson, Kat, and I were led to the Internal Medicine department by a PA wearing converses. We sat in a physician’s office where a doctor was seeing patients. The department was much busier and noisier than would see in
American clinics. When the doctor was seeing a patient, the patient’s family would frequently come in and out of the office to tell the doctor various things about the patient. There were also other patients who would come in and drop off their book of medical records while the doctor was interviewing the patient. Blue books are used for patients with chronic conditions. Yellow books are used all over Yunnan as standard medical record books.
Most patients that the doctor sees have Type 2 diabetes and simply come in to get prescriptions for insulin. However if patients use too much insulin, cancer can develop in the pancreas or other areas, after which the patient would have to live without insulin. Many times patients come in for extra prescriptions of insulin, for which the doctor would have to decline them. Children in China are at an increasingly higher risk for diabetes. The rate of diabetes in China is higher in the US and Hong Kong, which could have a multitude of causes. A diet of candy, soda, and unclean water can increase one’s risk to diabetes. There is also a lack of walking with many Chinese citizens who prefer
On the Way to the Spa
The clouds were gorgeous that day. to take taxis or buses.
Two of the patients that came in had swollen feet. When this happens, the doctor thinks of the possibilities of heart attack, hypertension, a lot of excess water in the body, or high blood pressure. The doctor can do a pulse reading to get a more accurate diagnosis. Sometimes the pulse of the feet is taken. If the pulse in the feet is very strong, there is a possibility of a problem with the blood vessels in the leg or feet.
After shadowing the doctor for a little over an hour, we had lunch and had our first group discussion on the first unit of learning material. Many snacks were provided by the program staff which we all thoroughly ate through despite just having lunch. The program staff sat quietly in the edge of the room while Caroline and Ben, our discussion leaders, presided over the discussion. We went through our list of study topics for our upcoming exam which Ben and Caroline used to make a comprehensive study guide. We added bits of information to their study guide as they went through what they compiled. It was great of them
to make the study guide for us and thanked them a lot, offering to treat them to dinner and whatnot.
6/19/10
On Saturday morning our group of twenty students split up into two separate groups. One group went to some caves in a nearby town while the other went to a spa in Hot Spring Valley. I wanted to go to the caves, but I did not wake up early enough and I was also feeling stressed out for multiple reasons, so I went with the spa group. We rode a bus to Hot Spring Valley which was covered in spa resorts. There were not any houses in sight, only spa buildings, swimsuit shops, convenience stores, and hotels.
After we arrived at the spa we made reservations at, we found that they gave discounts to students. I was very happy that I had grabbed my student ID and stuffed it in my wallet the night before leaving from the US. We definitely had Shika to thank for translating everything that the spa workers were saying to us and for asking about the discount. She even made the reservations for us at the spa before we
Really Expensive Hotel
We were thinking of spending the night, but at this particular hotel it costs 800 yuan per night to stay. went because she is the most fluent Chinese speaker out of all of us. Her parents are from Beijing, so she reads and speaks Chinese like a native.
It was very uncomfortable for me in the women’s changing room at the spa because there were naked Asian ladies everywhere, of all ages. There was even a topless woman toting around her toddler son by the hand through this mob of naked Asian women. It was awkward. I quickly changed into my bathing suit, grabbed a robe, and got out of there as fast as I could.
There were about a dozen springs and quite a few people in them. We managed to find a few springs that were unoccupied and slid into the water. The water was delightfully hot but not too hot. I had to slowly slide into the water so that your body will not feel like it is burning, but once most of my body was underwater it was heavenly. I could feel the knots and stress in my body melt into the water. The springs smelled a bit badly because of the sulfur, but I quickly got used to the smell.
As we all soaked in the spring, a large number of Chinese people would slowly walk by or just stand and blatantly stare at us. Even though they were not looking at me, I glared at them all because some of them were ogling my friends. There was even one Chinese man in a neighboring spring that had a camcorder and videotaped us. We all just stared at him response, all of us too relaxed to work up the energy to yell at him. When Jordan got out of the bath to go back to the spa building, the guy panned his camera so that it followed Jordan as he walked up the slope. Needless to say, it was creepy.
We later explored the other springs, some of which were scented. There was a small rose bath with red water and red rose petals. There was a red apple bath which smelled like strawberry Jell-O. There were two green apple baths, but both were scalding hot so we only stayed long enough to smell them. The most interesting spring was one that was filled with small fish. If you sat still in the water, the fish would swim to you and eat the dead skin from your body. They did not hurt at all and in fact it felt very ticklish. Some of my friends could not stand being in the water at all, either out of disgust from getting eaten by fish or from sheer ticklishness. It took me a long time to get used to the ticklish feeling before I was finally able to hold still long enough to gather fish all up and down my legs. Some of my friends slumped down in the water to expose their entire bodies to the fishes, but for the most part the fish only nibbled the dead skin on their arms and legs.
After soaking in the hot springs we all went to get massages. I got a full-body massage which was a bit awkward at first to have someone touch my body in places I’m not used to being touched, but after a while it felt very relaxing. Some of the manipulations were a bit painful, like the ones in my shoulders and legs, and some were very ticklish. When the masseuse told me to relax and I could not, she would work those areas even more, causing me to practically explode from trying not to laugh. Some of my friends nearby were getting massages and there was a very quiet atmosphere to help with relaxation, so I did not want to burst out in laughter.
When the massage was over, I felt completely at peace with myself and the world. It was a feeling that I rarely experienced to such a degree. My body felt like a constant source of contentment from how relaxed all of my muscles were. I felt no stress or tension whatsoever and simply sank into the cushy sofas in the lobby. Looking at my other friends in the lobby, I could tell they were thinking the same thing. This blissful feeling lasted for the rest of the day and the next morning.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.086s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 9; qc: 55; dbt: 0.0478s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
