The Great Chinese Medicine Scam

During the night, I had an epiphany. It came with the sound of something not unlike a piece of hard plastic, like a bead, being ricocheted off the wall and then bouncing across a wooden floor.

It wasn’t the first time I’d heard that noise tonight either.

It was the noise of the cough drop that was in my mouth being shot out during a coughing fit as if it had come out of an air gun.

The air had been so bad all day that this was the worst night of coughing yet, and apart from it being damned annoying and tiresome, it keeps waking the baby.

I fumbled around in the medicine pouch in the dark and came across a package of Halls cough drops we’d brought from the States. I popped it in my mouth and within 5 minutes my coughing was over. Greatly relieved and trying to blot out the sound of James screaming, I began to ponder the imponderable.

Why do people believe in crackpot things? What is the inherent gullibility in human beings to believe complete and utter crap without a single shred of tangible proof?

First off, most of the rubbish people believe has been handed to them by their
parents, who in turn were brainwashed by theirs, and so on. (And beware the truly fanatical crackpots who come upon their crack-pottery without the benefit of parental brainwashing!)

In the case of Chinese Medicine, it’s a whole lot of parents and, I’m now convinced, an enormous conspiracy brewed up by its practitioners.

Consider the following evidence.

If you have a cold or flu, Dayquil and Nyquil work! Although they don’t cure a cold or flu, they lessen the symptoms to make it more manageable (and no, I’m not a shill for the ‘Quils.)

You can’t find it in Taiwan. What you can find is “Panadol Cold and Flu”. It has similar ingredients to Dayquil, and it makes similar claims, but it doesn’t work! (Or if it does work at all, it doesn’t work a tenth as well – from my own experience.)

Or these cough drops – they’re made by Robitussin (more on that later) but they just don’t do anything, yet the Halls – which I can’t find here – work almost instantly.

And then there’s Robitussin DM cough syrup. There’s a big name US medicine that you can find in Taiwan. One of the few.

As far as I can tell, Robitussin has never worked anywhere. Whenever I take the stuff, I cough worse for the next 30 minutes. I’ve experienced this for years, and it’s only the wildest of optimism (or the doctor’s orders) that gets me to take it again. Time and time again, it doesn’t work.

So, what’s the conclusion? Chinese traditional medicine practitioners (I daren’t use the word “doctors”) has somehow managed to only allow western medicine into Taiwan that doesn’t work!

After you’ve tried this so-called western medicine a few times without success, having a mechanically-applied hickey or some burning roots waved around under your feet doesn’t sound so insane.