A Skeptic Stands Corrected
Kyna Rubin
March 18, 2011
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Kyna Rubin
I’m prostrate in a Fujian hospital bed. It’s 1980 China, where I’m on a job interpreting for National Geographic–my first gig after graduate school. Fourteen-hour workdays have worn me down, and I’ve contracted bronchitis.
The clinic doctors are required to treat me with both Western and Chinese medicine, which explains the daily shots of tetracycline in my now bruised thigh and the grainy little brown pills I gamely down with boiled water.
“What’s in them?” I ask.
I think I hear something about deer’s antlers and bear sperm, and I don’t want to know much more. But I recover.
Was it the modern or the traditional treatment that