Halloween 快乐!

This post is almost necessarily a quickie -- I posted last night, and there isn't a whole lot to report. But I couldn't let my favorite holiday go by without some kind of mention.

Not that it's much of anything here in Tianjin, so far as I can tell. I imagine that some expats are having a party, somewhere, but since I haven't met any American expats who are still here.... I guess I'll have to go around the rest of the night dressed as a 洋鬼子 (yang guizi, "devil foreigner").

So much for my attempts at humor for the evening! Anyway, today I was in the psychosomatic department -- but not the Andryny sub-section. Working on that for Monday or Tuesday, but the real problem is that most of the translators are women, and the guys don't want to be confessing their sexual inadequacies in front of women. Go figure... it's really not all that different from in the US.

But this was a total change of pace. The patients are mostly insomnia or depression cases... sound familiar to any US-based Chinese Medicine practitioners out there? It's mostly being treated by the doctor with a combination of Western medicine and Chinese herbs, with occasional acupuncture thrown in, instead of the other way around. Here's one of the places where Chinese is a lot easier, since it's 西药 (Xiyao, "Western Medicine") and 中药 (Zhongyao, "Chinese Medicine") to differentiate the two. When I explain the regulatory environment in the US to folks here, I get amazed looks that (a) anyone can prescribe Chinese Medicine and (b) a licensed TCM practitioner can't prescribe ANY Western meds.

The patients were mostly repeats, so the pace was pretty quick -- 57 patients between 8:00 am and 12:30 pm, to be exact. That's almost 13 patients per hour! And the new patients took some time -- 20 minutes to half an hour each. Good thing we only had about three of those.

Anyway, I'm off to haunt the streets for a little bit. Give some candy to some kids for me.