George's 4 Rules for Taking Chinese Medicine

There are a lot of Chinese drug stores here, and since Grace has some Chinese ancestry, it isn't surprising that she suggested I take a medicine from the Mandarin drug store, especially since it is cheaper, reportedly more effective, and much easier to get than the Mumbai pills I got from the online Canadian site.

We bought two pills, I took one, and it worked VERY well.

Subsequently, I started wondering what was in the pill.  Prompted by a scene in the movie, "The Air Up There," in which Kevin Bacon finds out the poultice soothing his injured head is made from sterilized camel dung, I joked that the Chinese medicine was probably sterilized yak dung.

When we bought a bottle, all the writing on the outside of the box was in Chinese,  but a small paper inside listed the ingredients in English.  Fortunately, dung was not among the ingredients, but a part of the yak was.  This brought up the whole issue of using animal parts in over the counter medicine, and I'll talk about that later.

The next time I took a pill, it didn't work nearly as well. Now it might have been a puny yak in that pill, but it is more likely that knowing what I took degraded the effectiveness.  The experience led me to formulate the following rules for taking Chinese medicine.

1. Only take Chinese medicine if someone you really trust, and who knows what to buy, recommends it.

2. Do not read the list of ingredients.

3. If it works, make sure you NEVER read the list of ingredients. Tell yourself that it works by ancient Chinese magic and keep your curiosity under control.  Remind yourself what happened to Pandora frequently.

4. If it does not work, read the list of ingredients. Maybe knowing what you are taking will make it effective for you.

I'm very glad there wasn't tiger or rhino, or some other endangered and poached animal in the pill.  I still don't know how I feel about the issue.  If it is OK to use one animal, how do we keep endangered animals off limits when they are reputed to be more potent?  If it works, why is taking a pill with yak, seal, and small water turtle parts in it any worse than taking something made in a lab?  By the way, the third pill must have come from a BIG bull yak, so I'll be taking the pills until they find a cure for age.

I took a lot of Biology in high school and college, and I have always agreed with my teachers and professors that humane use of animals in medical research is vital to human health.  However, one has to put the "HUMANE" in bold all caps.  Mr. Houser, my favorite Biology teacher, was fierce in his insistence that proper pre-vivasection procedures MUST be followed so the animal would NOT feel any pain.  After all the surgery I've had, even with anesthesia, there is still a fear factor.  I think it is dangerous to anthropomorphize and say that animals must feel that fear even more than humans.  Still, I have to ask myself, "How do we know what an animal feels and to what degree an animal can think or reason?"  Is brain size a factor?  Is there some critical mass that has to be reached before an organism is sentient?  Is it any different to use parts of animals in medicine than it is to eat hamburger or steak?  I've spent some time moving cows from here to there, and my experience has been that they are one of the stupidest creatures alive, so perhaps brain size isn't a good criteria.  Maybe some ratio of brain volume to overall weight?  Well, until Francis the mule talks in real life, not just in the movies, or Mr. Ed breaks his vow of public silence, or we get smart enough to translate dolphin speak, there will be more questions than answers, and no way to resolve the issue.

I think everyone will agree that we need to treat medical research animals humanely, but that brings up the issue of who gets to decide what is humane treatment and how do we administer and enforce any rules we make?  Do we need an escape clause if an endangered species is the only key to stopping a pandemic from making humans extinct?

Have you noticed that I ask a lot of questions and don't give many answers?  I think the history major part of me is responsible for that.  All I do know is that the more I see, the more questions I have, and the less sure I am about everything I thought was fact.