Day 12 in Xining

Happy Belated Canada Day!

In honor of yesterday, the two other Canadians and I hosted a little Canada tribute evening. We made a little jeapordy game for our fellow Americans, split them up, and forced them to compete against each other. The categories were history, geography, sports, people and miscellaneous (did you know Keanu Reeves is Canadian?). We used wikipedia to come up with all the questions, as I clearly wouldnt have known any of the answers in the first place. We spiced up the educational side of things with some wine we bought at the store. All the wine here is 'Great Wall' brand - it's horrible. Sometimes almost undrinkable. Oh, and the losers' prize was a package of Yak Jerkey!

Other than last night's festivities, there is not much to report on. Morning observations in the clinic have started to become a bit repetitive, so someone in our group had a little talk with Renchen 'the Don' Dhondrup about how to make things a bit more structured dynamic. So yesterday, we were brought into a patient's room and went through all the steps that a Tibetan Doctor would go through if he were seeing the patient for the first time (which we hadnt done before). This was a lot more interesting and forced us to take on more of an active role. The basic outline for a patient encounter is the following: Questioning (where do you live? what do you do? what are your symptoms?) followed by observation, which includes urine diagnosis, stool analysis (we skipped this one, thankfully), and tongue analysis. Then there is pulse diagnosis. After you gather all of the data, it is then one's job to put it all together and place the patient's symptoms in the context of an imbalance of the three humors. This particular patient had leg weakness/paralysis, leg swelling. For example, an inability to ambulate implies a decrease or dysfunction in the patient's rLung (wind humor), which represents movement and circulatory processes in the body (not just blood circulation, but general fluidity in the body). The leg swelling is attributed to an increase in 'yellow liquid' which can be compared to it's Western counterpart, lymphatic fluid. While lymphatic fluid is derived from blood in Western thinking, it is a bit more complicated in Tibetan theory (pretty much over my head). Furthermore, the patient's urine was orange-ish, had a lot of sediment, a pungent odor, prominent vapors and when you stirred it, the bubbles disappeared quickly (I was given the task of stirring the urine). All of these characteristics are classic for a 'Hot' disease (a lot of diseases can be initially classified as 'hot' or 'cold' before getting more specific), in this case likely due to an increase in Tripa (Bile humor). Treatment would then be designed specifically for this patient to bring his humors back into balance. Pretty interesting, no?

While the doctors apparently learn how to use stethoscopes, I havent yet seen a doctor using one. In my limited experience, it also seems that there is less physical contact with the patients here, as opposed to Western medicine (ironic, since Western doctors are usually criticized for being distant). In fact, the only touching we did for this patient was when we felt his pulses.

I will upload some more photos soon. I got some really nice shots of the mountains and city from this mountain top park that we went to yesterday, 'Nan Shang Gong Yuen' (literally north mountain public park). I am really enjoying my Chinese lessons and am starting to be able to communicate, in extremely basic terms, at restaurants and stores. Our group's biggest outings are still going for lunch/dinner (meals here are leisurely and tend to last at least 1.5 hours) as there doesnt seem to be much else to do in this city. This weekend we are going to Lake Kokonor (Qinghai lake) for a day trip. It is the largest lake in China and is supposed to be beautiful:

http://www.amoshapp.com/kokonor.jpg

Hope you are all doing well and enjoying the summer. Look forward to hearing from you soon.

Love,
Tyler