Summer 2005

Sarah Madison Davenport (English, '07)

If it would give you a hint into how unlikely a candidate I am to go to China, let me tell you that I'm an English major. However, I am also a pre-medical student at Davidson. Having worked with doctors in the US, volunteered at a variety of medical institutions and read the newspaper upon occasion, I recognize the crisis in health care. It's a big bloody mess. With the withering prospect of expensive drugs, inaccessible health care professionals and burgeoning insurance issues, perhaps few would wonder that without exception, every doctor with whom I have worked has advised me against medicine. So to China I went, with a program SIT calls "public health and traditional Chinese medicine." Aside from living in Kunming (a"small" city of 4 million), travelling to such far reaching outposts as Zhongdian (also known as Shangri-La, for tourist purposes), Dali, Lijiang, and Weibaoshan, I whiled away my time learning about traditional herbs that can cure everything from diarrhea to dysmenorrhea to cancer, massage techniques to alleviate disharmonies in qi, acupuncture to stimulate immune response, moxibustion, and traditional diagnostic techniques. To reinforce the point, I met a Buddhist monk who cure people with meditation and judicious doses of horse manure, an illiterate Tibetan doctor who had learned medicine from his grandfather, Dr He of Jade Snow Dragon Mountain medical clinic who handles his own patients and researches leukemia cures for the Mayo Institute on the side, Naxi shamans who cure disease through prayer, dedicated doctors in Kunming, and, naturally, a young western doctor who said it was all a waste of time. Well, maybe it is. And maybe my epic journey searching for the Shangri-La of medicine was also a waste of time, but as hard a pill as this might be to take: chinese medicine has some distinct advantages over western medicine. It's cheaper, for one. It's less toxic, for another. So while you might have to drink that nasty smelling potion for several months, it doesn't raise your blood pressure like a cortisone shot. After the debacle with Cox-2 inhibitors like Vioxx and Celebrex, Western medicine is moving in this direction. Who knows, maybe one day Americans will get concerned about their qi.

The picture above is me at Fu Min, a small city outside of Kunming in the Yunnan province of China. I kept trying to ask what the horse's name was. Our driver, thinking me a ridiculous yankee chit, told me it was called "horse."