After one week at the hospital...

It has been just over a week in the department of acupuncture under Dr Zhao. She is one flamboyant character whose personality easily fills up the room; her vast array of facial expressions transfixed me for the first couple of days.

I heard quite a few stories about how different clinical practice is in China  compared to the West and this setting is no exception. If anything it is probably more run down than others because the whole hospital will be soon transferred to a brand new building and the Chinese are not very good at looking after their buildings…what gets old, gets destroyed seems to be the motto and in the meantime things fall apart (like most stuff in my room).

Patients never come on their own, in fact they have at least one family member but most often two or three which makes the room easily crowded. Like other things in China, there doesn’t seem to be many rules. Consultations are easily interrupted by other patients making sure that Dr Zhao knows they are there, people walking in bringing gifts or with business proposals or Dr Zhao herself answering private calls. Patients’ complaints and stories are shared with at least thirty people in the room and they often continue on the treatment table or after being dismissed by Dr Zhao.

I am making the most of this formality free environment and so for example it felt perfectly normal this morning to literally stick  my head and rummage into one patient’s bag of herbs to check out what he had been prescribed (in fact the patient helped me to do that). I must remember that next time I give grief to someone at the supermarket for having sneaked upon me and checked the content of my basket (yes it happens often!).

Most patients come for conditions such as cerebral palsy, stroke, insomnia, numbness, depression/anxiety, tinnitus and certain types of pain. The needles used are indeed thicker and longer but I haven’t seen anything too extravagant; in fact stimulation is down to a bare minimum but I must say the number of scalp points used is quite extraordinary. 

The other day one of the Chinese students’ head was used as a pin cushion to demonstrate our needling techniques; I cannot see that happening any time soon at the University of Westminster where I trained. The chosen one was a particularly timid student, as loudly pointed out by dr Zhao, in the hope he would overcome his shyness.. She certainly got some reaction from the guy, although maybe not the desired one.

If in Chinese medicine we usually say that there four methods of diagnosis, for Dr Zhao there is a fifth; one that comes before anything else which is the MRI. Nobody walks in without one; we were told she is the expert at reading them. I believe that; she looks at the MRI before doing anything else quickly followed by neurological tests… it is such a routine that even the other foreign students who don’t speak Chinese have started chanting to themselves with the same lament like tone ‘扎这儿疼？ ‘扎这儿疼？ 一样吗？’(does touching/pricking here hurt? And here? Is it the same?).

Dr Zhao is often delighted to inform her patients about diseases we don’t see in our clinics and usually proceeds to give us a quick lecture which consists of reaching for her book and reading out some paragraph of explanations constellated with Western medical terms that sends our poor translator into a panic. At this point I can perceive the boredom spreading among my fellow students and my only consolation is to concentrate on the language aspect of things. Today she gave what seemed like the first real explanation of some patient’s condition from a Chinese medicine point of view; the sense of relief was palpable.

Although not having had any epiphany of the sort, I am learning something everyday and admittedly the placement being through scholarship and therefore free, it takes some of the pressure off; certainly that is the reason why I think most of my colleagues are putting up with translation which is rather poor and often a collective effort. Everybody who is assigned the job gets a scolding from dr Zhao for not being a good enough translator (which is true but then again the poor victim is a ‘volunteer’ student because we are scholarship students so there is no funding for a professional one). I sometimes feel like telling her that we are the ones visiting but for obvious reasons I shut up (well I don’t want to eat my dinner on my own, right?). Don’t get me wrong, my Chinese is super basic but paired with the shaky translation I feel like I have less gaps in the bigger picture. Well after all, I have put myself through a few weeks of isolation at -25 degrees and it seems to have paid off.