User Comments - sclim

Posted on: Meeting in Real Life

CP Management: there has crept in another "er"儿, unwritten in the text, but added in by the voice actor in the first line of the dialogue.

I'm sure it doesn't matter at this stage; the Intermediate level Poddies won't be thrown off at all by this, unlike when it happens in a Newbie or Elementary lesson. In fact, seeing how naturally it happens to the Voice actors on more than one occasion is actually very instructive in showing how sometimes a noun can almost seem to demand the use of 儿 to make it roll off the tongue more naturally!

Posted on: Meeting in Real Life

Jenny said it right-- "creepy"!!

Posted on: Chinese Folk Medicine

I looked it up: it was so long ago that I had forgotten the details. It was actually October 1967; I had just left Singapore, but my brother was a medical student in Singapore at the time, and breathlessly conveyed to me the facts and the vivid and spectacular details! The rumour on the street was that the disease was caused by eating pork from pigs that had been inoculated against swine flu (huge anti-science or fear of the unfamiliar element operating here!). Sales of pork plummeted, and the pork sellers, in fact all operators up and down the pork production chain were really screwed for quite a few weeks! I can't remember exactly how long the scare lasted, but it seems to me that after a few weeks, the "disease" suddenly disappeared, and everything was back to normal.

It's hard to describe how "real" it seems when you're surrounded by people manifesting this fear that this might happen to you, let alone the few who are actually in the midst of an actual "attack".

Lest you might think that this could only happen in some far away Asian country with weird beliefs, I regularly see people suffering from poorly described syndromes whose only connection seems to be that someone they know has something like that and they eventually died of XYX or whatever. You may say that the only thing that proves is that I was too stupid to pick up on the subtleties of the clues that they were providing to a real disease process that, in my carelessness, I missed, and I'm sure that could have happened at least once or a few times in all those years, but it's not as though I didn't look.

But regularly there happens in Calgary where I live that some school somewhere becomes the site of a phenomenon of kids getting sick, nauseated, dizzy etc., and public health officials are unable to conclusively determine the cause, but suspicions are raised that it might have been the air or water being contaminated with ?moulds, ?unspecified bacteria,?CO, ?pollens, ?too much chemical cleanser, ?other particulate matter, or that the cafetaria was contaminated with chemicals or biological agents...the usual suspects. Within days of newspaper and radio reports, all across Calgary schools are reporting that large number of students are coming down with similar complaints, and the emergency departments are jammed with hundreds such kids seeking help! Occasionally some valid culprit is found in a small number of kids in the original school, but never in the other schools. It's hard to come away from this with any other explanation than "mass hysteria", although conspiracy theorists always have a field day.

Yes, if it is a myth, and I have to believe it is (there is no physiological mechanism that I am aware of that will make a penis or a nipple retract into the body in real time and disappear), it is hard to dispel, as it is for all myths.

Posted on: Chinese Folk Medicine

Having described "at a distance" several "folk" beliefs, it may appear that I have absolutely no faith in anything promulgated by "folk" or "traditional" practitioners. That would not be true: while I am, by life experience, a profound skeptic, that skepicism remains evenly distributed, I hope, covering claims made by all camps, "holistic", "rational", "naturopathic", "scientifc", which to my mind, remain unproven, and thus not necessarily believable unless they can be proven pragmatically and explained logically using reproducible observations and resultant reasoning previously shown to be acceptable using the same rigorous criteria.

Now hiccups are the manifestation of recurrent spasms of the (abdomino-thoracic) diaphragm. They do have some voluntary component in that you can voluntarily suppress, to some degree, the frequency and severity of the spasms. The remedies mentioned in the lesson all have some beneficial effect, in my personal experience. They all seem to have some common physiological theme: stimulation of the vagus nerve (10th cranial nerve). While the full physiology of the vagus nerve is somewhat complicated, all the procedures mentioned (holding breath, drinking while holding breath, nausea induced by smelling burning fingernails) result in stimulation of the vagus. In addition, the mental distraction afforded by these interventions, particularly that associated with getting startled or scared, which was also mentioned, may also assist in breaking the recurrent cycle of recovery from getting a spasm and gradually building up tension within the diaphragm to trigger the next spasm.

Many of the vagus nerve effects can be additive. Using this principle, I have often used a method (I make no claim for original invention!) that combines several interventions, and seems to work with a higher percentage or more rapidly than any of the single interventions. Rapidly drink a glass of very cold milk or water (with crushed ice in it), then immediately stand on your head or do a hand-stand using a wall or door for support, if necessary. If you still have enough wits around you to do a further thing, do a valsalva maneuvre while inverted, that is, close your glottis (larynx muscles) and do a hard sustained grunt, raising the pressure within your thorax and abdomen. Be careful coming out of this position, as the blood pressure drops rapidly, and you are likely to faint if you stand up suddenly (natural consequence of vagal nerve stimulation). One might reasonably ask if the cure is worse than the disease, and one might be right!

I assume, of course, (as is almost always the case) that the hiccups are not associated with any underlying disease process.

Posted on: Chinese Folk Medicine

This is interesting, and hard to dissect. First of all, where did the distinction of "alternative"  remedies arise? What I mean is, nowadays, "alternative" means alternative to "Western Style" medical concepts which to various degrees Chinese people have accepted as "standard". So what is considered "Folk" or "Alternative" might vary according to differnt people surveyed.

I say this in inverted commas, because, belief systems are hard to sort out. From my experience as a physician in Canada I find that although, nominally, most western people accept the truth of Western Medicinal Research derived principles and remedies, their own adherence to fundamental core beliefs from their particular cultural background sometimes is at odds with their acceptance of medical advice. The differences between different European and North American belief systems about health and body function is too complicated to get into here.

However, it is a useful lead in to what Chinese people believe in, with regard to body systems and health. I believe that a fundamental belief held in Chinese culture is that there is an equilibrium that must be held in the body between certain dualities that is characterized as Yin and Yang. Of the dualities, among the most important, perhaps the only one that I can remember that the Chinese community around me, growing up in Singapore paid any attention to was the concept of 冷 and 熱 which was not exactly "cold" or "hot" in the physical sense, but rather a mysterious (to me, anyway) quality that was sometimes related to physical heat, but not always. For example coconut water was "heaty" even though it was cool to drink. Watermelon was "cooling" as a Westerner would expect. But life was governed by all sorts of fears and taboos. Menstruation was affected by too much 冷 , and therefore during menstruation you couldn't wash your hair or eat watermelon, otherwise some unspecified (as far as I knew) bad thing would happen. I suspect the ginger and sugar remedy for menstrual pain in the BST lesson falls into that category, and that David didn't just add "menstual period" as a casual example of abdominal pain, but rather had a specific memory of this remedy for menstrual pain.

The admitting to others or even to yourself that you had some of that belief system operating in your psyche could be difficult. My mother considered herself very sophisticated and knowledgeble about things western. My father was professor of (Western) medicine at the university. Despite this, as I remember, my mother rarely drank cold water with ice in it even in the stifling heat of Singapore. I'm sure this was from an innate phobia of ingesting too much 冷. Other Chinese people would go further and insist on drinking HOT water, and it was a common sight to see on the office desks of traditionalists (or on tables in homes) a thermos flask of hot water to drink from at will.

This is changing, of course with the loosening of traditions by younger people, but I still encounter some conflict by patients of Chinese origin who doggedly pursue a course of action driven, apparently by some ying/yang concept or the concept of 風 as a source of illness that I haven't fully sorted out.

There were also diseases that existed purely in the minds of people whose belief systems included those diseases. The most remarkable of these, in my opinion, was an epidemic of koro (Malay name, but known in Chinese as 缩阳), that occured in Singapore in about 1969. This was the belief that the penis (or rarely, the female breast) was shrinking or retracting into the body, and you better hang on to it or else it would totally diasppear and you would die. The emergency departments in Singapore were flooded with worried and desperate men (and a few women) of all ages, frantically gripping their penises, (or breast) and with all kinds of improvised devices for clamping them safe from irretrievable retraction.

Posted on: Is it Spicy?

Sorry, I forgot this was a Newbie lesson and omitted to pinyinize and translate:

超超辣的綠色的小辣椒

chāochāolà4de lǜsède xiǎolàjiāo

super-super-spicy, green, small chili

Posted on: We're lost

Thanks for the full explanation. I was familiar with 姐姐, but I didn't realize it was an exception, and that I could not use this as a guide to the way to manage 3rd tone-neutral tone most of the time. Actually, come to think of it, I know how to say 小姐 and 哪里 properly; I just never thought to observe that this was contrary to the rule that 姐姐 appeared (in my head, as it turns out, wrongly) to demonstrate. Thanks for clearing this up!

Posted on: We're lost

Yes, thank you.

Posted on: Strong (in the abstract)

谢谢!

Posted on: We're lost

I was trying to make a play on the name 越南 Vietnam = 越往南, but it doesn't work if you can't use 越南...the two words together like that to mean "the further (I go) south...", does it?