TCM believers

A traditional Chinese medical treatment for warts. Photo: Courtesy of Beijing Dongwen TCM Clinic

Aimée Lamb had something itchy growing on her hand. The American English teacher in her mid 20s knew her Western doctor would just give her some cream to put on it, so she decided to try traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). She went online and found a clinic that specializes in skin problems.

Instead of only checking her hand, the doctor looked at her tongue, her face, and then her skin, and said, "You have freckles. You foreigners have freckles - so unhealthy."

After poking and looking at her for a while, the doctor wrote down about 30 different ingredients for Lamb's prescription. Lamb took the paper to a pharmacy and got bags of foul smelling medicinal "soup" that she was instructed to heat and drink twice a day, for five days. "It was kind of disgusting," said Lamb. But she claims the itch went away as a result.

This was Lamb's first encounter with Chinese medicine, and she found it quite bizarre because of the doctor's examination technique and comments about her skin.

Warts and all

Then Lamb had a wart on her hand. She tried some Western medicine, but it ended up burning a hole on her hand because she didn't follow the directions carefully. However, the wart remained.

Lamb then found a way on the Internet to treat it organically. She mashed some garlic onto it. "It got infected. Green stuff was coming out."

Left without much choice, she went to a TCM doctor, who took out a needle, heated it in a flame, and speared the wart repeatedly. After a week her wart was gone.

This January when the air in Beijing was really bad, she had pneumonia. The same doctor stuck needles into her back. Then he picked her up and bent her spine, causing her vertebrae to crack.

Lamb said she was not afraid of acupuncture or having her back cracked. On the contrary, she is more afraid of Western medicine. "It's nice to know that there are no chemicals in your medicine," said Lamb, referring to TCM medicine.

The doctor also did a TCM physical examination of Lamb. Without knowing her, he told her about her medical history and health condition with an amazing level of accuracy, using a cryptic chart full of graphs representing things like deficiency of yin, toxicity inside the body, and other mysterious terms.

"It was almost like magic," said Lamb. "But it doesn't surprise me that TCM works, because it's such an old thing," said Lamb.

Another American treated her lung troubles with TCM. When the American expat surnamed Merrill came to Beijing for the first time in the winter of 2011, she caught bronchitis. After spending 3,000 yuan ($489) in a local hospital on a weeklong intravenous drip treatment, which she thinks was totally unnecessary, she still coughed up phlegm.

"That experience was terrible, and I don't want to go to one of those clinics again," said Merrill. But she could not afford to go to a foreign private hospital.

She had long been curious about TCM and wanted to see what it could do, so when she had the same symptoms again two months ago, she went to a TCM doctor for the first time. Merrill received acupuncture treatment, some herbal medicine and some tea. She recovered after one week at a cost of only a few hundred yuan.

Merrill said low cost and high effectiveness were the advantages of TCM. "Of course if I had a car accident with blood gushing out, I'd go to a Western clinic. But for pain management, I prefer TCM," she concluded.

Neither of them knew anything about TCM back in America. But once in China they became accepting of new things. "When you see people walking on the street with bruises on their back, you think to yourself - oh my God, their husband is beating them, with something circular," said Lamb, sharing her first impression of cupping, a TCM treatment involving suction.

"But I don't think you should choose one over another just because you don't believe in it," said Merrill. "You should go and do research, and make a smarter decision with more information."

"Because at the end of the day, not getting chemicals in your body is healthier for you," said Lamb.

When Merrill's parents were travelling in Beijing and coughed from the polluted air, Merrill picked up some traditional cough drugs containing snake bile. She quickly ripped off the label. "It can be a little challenging and scary for foreigners to take Chinese medicine, such as venom wine, penises and these kind of things," said Merrill.