Chinese Medicine

Hello everyone and welcome to EnglishPod.

My name is Marco.

My name is Catherine.

And today we have a very advanced lesson for you all about medicine.

That's right.

Today we're going to take a look at what is very widely known as Chinese traditional medicine.

So a very interesting topic in general.

That's right.

And for people who use this, they might call it TCM, traditional Chinese medicine.

So remember that there's that acronym as well.

But let's take a listen to today's dialogue and when we come back, we'll be discussing

some of the important words and phrases in the dialogue.

What's wrong?

I have a headache.

These past few days I've been living off painkillers.

Man, I feel like my head is going to explode.

You should get acupuncture treatment.

My mom was always having headache issues and it was acupuncture that cured her.

The results are too slow.

On top of that, just the thought of smoking needles poking into my flesh frightens me.

They don't just randomly stick you.

They find your pressure points.

The heat allows the body to immediately respond to the treatment, restoring the body's qi.

But I get scared the moment I see a needle.

How could I stand having needles in my body for hours on end?

The needles are very thin.

And as long as the doctor's technique is good and the patient himself is relaxed, it won't

hurt.

On the contrary, it will actually alleviate pain.

Now there are high-tech needles that are micro-thin.

They don't hurt at all.

However, if you are really scared of acupuncture, scraping or cupping are also options.

Scraping is too terrifying.

When they finish scraping, your body is all red as if you were just tortured.

Cupping is the same.

Your body ends up with red circles all over it.

It looks like someone beat you up.

This only signifies that the toxins have left the body.

Actually, there's only discomfort during the treatment process.

Once it's over, you'll feel very comfortable.

Chinese medicine is strange.

The patients are already ill and then the doctor makes them suffer more.

This is the only way to get at the problem.

Anyway, if you want to relieve the pain, you are just going to have to be tough and do

it.

Forget it.

I don't want to inflict any more pain on myself.

In a little while, I'll go and buy some more painkillers and take a nap.

All right, we're back.

So now obviously we are talking about what is commonly known as alternative medicine

because we know that traditional medicine nowadays is doctors, you have antibiotics,

that sort of thing.

And here you're actually using these techniques and these different ways of curing someone.

So the first thing that comes to mind here is acupuncture.

That's right.

So acupuncture is usually considered a part of Chinese medicine and it's a kind of medicine

that uses needles in different parts of the body.

So it might look really scary because you see people lying on their stomachs with needles

coming out of their backs.

And the places where they put the needles in, they're called pressure points, right?

That's right.

And pressure points are things that we talk about with massages as well.

So a good masseuse, a person who does a massage, will also look for these pressure points,

which are key points on the body.

And in acupuncture, they'll put these needles into those points as well because each point

relates to a different part of the body, like the liver or the kidneys.

Right.

So it's actually very interesting, the fact that by sticking a needle in one of these

pressure points, they are curing or alleviating the pain of maybe, like you say, your kidney

or your liver or something like this.

This is a really great word though, Marco, the word that you just used, to alleviate

pain.

Now to alleviate pain means to make the pain go away.

So we heard the opposite of that as well, also at the very end of today's dialogue.

So the opposite of alleviate would be to inflict pain.

This is to do pain to yourself or to someone else.

To cause pain.

To cause pain.

So to alleviate is to take it away and to inflict is to cause.

So now acupuncture is very popular.

Sticking needles in people's pressure points, it does seem like it would hurt, but there

are other ones that maybe are not as widely known.

The next one that we're going to talk about is scraping.

Scraping.

So to scrape is a verb and you can scrape the bottom of your plate with your spoon or

you can scrape on, you know, sometimes cats like to scrape on the furniture.

They use their claws and make that sound.

But in this case, scraping is a little bit more maybe painful sounding.

What do they do in scraping?

So basically it's the same thing.

They use different tools and they scrape your body.

They just, I don't know, basically what I understand from it is that they are extracting

the illness by taking it out of your skin.

So they use what looks like a small knife or like a flat kind of sharp blade.

And they actually kind of take off the top layer of your skin.

They scrape it away.

It's very, very painful from what I've heard.

I've never done it myself, but as we see in the dialogue, it does look very, it looks

like you've been hit or treated poorly at the prison or something because your skin

is red and almost bleeding.

That's right.

And another one that actually looks quite painful when you see someone after they've

done it is called cupping.

Right.

Now, this one you might have seen even in the last Karate Kid movie.

Basically it's a little round bulb or a little round glass cup and the doctor, the Chinese

doctor will light a piece of cotton and will put the cup over it and the suction effect

that by putting out the fire and it sucks up all the oxygen and everything causes the

cup to suck onto your skin really, really tight.

You put it on your skin so it creates a vacuum, right?

Exactly.

There's no air coming in.

And that way the cup that there's no air in has to pull out all those chemicals and those

toxins and that oil from your skin and take it away.

Right.

Right.

So it's actually pulling at your skin.

Yeah.

And well, that's the thing with the vacuum effect is so great and pulling it out with

such force that you're actually left with a big purple or red circle on your skin from

I guess the blood clot type thing that is caused by it.

So you will see a person's back maybe and they have bruises.

Bruises.

Yeah, like six, seven, ten bruises on their backs.

Although I am told that even though it's very painful and it looks even more painful, the

effect is that it does help your circulation.

It helps the blood in your body move around more freely.

Yeah, I've heard the same thing.

And even though that it looks painful and it may be painful while they're doing it,

I've heard that after it's done, even though it looks like it should hurt, it looks like

a bruise, it doesn't hurt like a bruise.

So people don't actually say, oh, you know, don't touch my back.

It really hurts.

It doesn't really seem that way.

Well, and there's an interesting line in the dialogue that is related to this.

It's about scraping actually, but you can say it about cupping as well.

Your body is all red as if you were just tortured.

Now as if you were tortured or we could say as if you were beaten up.

And in this case, was the person tortured?

No.

It's basically a relation or making that relation that your skin is so, let's say bloody that

it looks as if you were tortured.

So it seems like somebody hit you with a whip or something.

It looks like you were tortured, but you weren't.

So as if is a way for us to make a comparison or an analogy.

Right.

I think you can see it in maybe books, you know, so maybe you would describe a guy saying,

oh, he was really angry as if he had rabies.

Yeah, it's as if he had rabies like he doesn't, but he's acting like he does.

Or maybe you run into the kitchen and eat so much food as if you hadn't eaten in days.

Exactly.

So you have obviously, but you're acting like someone who is starving.

So yeah, that is an interesting way to describe or to make a connection between two different

things.

And well, Chinese traditional medicine as well, a very interesting and historical form

of treating illnesses.

Now I'm told that it does work, even though some people are very skeptical about it.

And I don't think it's accepted in the international medical field.

Well, I think that there's a Western medicine which has its benefits.

You know, you have penicillin and all of these different antibiotics to help us combat different

diseases and bacteria.

But also traditional Chinese medicine kind of helps other things.

I think there is a spirituality, this idea that we have a chi, there are positive and

negative forces in our bodies, and sometimes trauma or big events will make that chi kind

of, well, it'll affect it in a bad way.

So the chi is unbalanced.

And so a lot of this is about rebalancing your system.

And if you believe that and you really understand that there are certain forces inside your

body, then I'm sure this kind of medicine has a positive effect on you.

Right.

I believe that it does have its ups and downs.

I was very skeptical about it until once, actually, I had a very, very bad headache

and somebody took and pushed a pressure point on my finger, on my thumb for about maybe

one or two minutes and the headache was gone.

So I was very much amazed.

But at the same time, when people are treated maybe for, you know, maybe they can conceive

a baby and they're doing these rituals or giving them ginger or different roots to drink

and eat and stuff.

I don't know if that really does help or what evidence there is that it actually does work.

Well, I think that's something that also is important to look at on an individual basis.

I don't think even some Western medicines help all the time if you're not in a place

where you believe that it will work.

But the interesting aspect of it is, of course, so many years ago, we're talking about hundreds

or thousands of years ago, when there was no Western medicine and then people were being

cured and treated by these techniques, which actually worked.

So there is a very interesting aspect that maybe even Western medicine can learn from

traditional medicine like this.

Definitely.

So it's an interesting topic, Oriental medicine, Western medicine, but we want to know what

you think about it.

We also want to know in your home country, do you have a traditional kind of medicine

or any medical alternatives to Western medicine?

Let us know, our website is EnglishPod.com.

All right, we'll see you guys there.

Bye.

This is Mike with modern medicine.