Mixing east and west: a tour of the MUST hospital

Yesterday afternoon, Susan and I went to tour the hospital at the Macau University of Science and Technology (MUST), where Brian and Mari teach English. While Macau doesn’t have a proper medical school, the hospital is associated with MUST’s Chinese medicine program, but it also offers Western medical treatments. We were invited by Dr. Morgan, the director of the Hope Clinic in Macau, who has also graciously allowed us to shadow a few times.

The first stop (and perhaps place of greatest interest) was the Chinese pharmacy, located right on the ground floor next to the Western one. While the room was gleamingly hygienic and scientific-looking, the contents of the drawers were straight out of an apothecary's shop.

Some of the rarer ingredients: snakeskin and centipedes

Dried lizards o_O

One of the interesting things about the pharmacy is that they try to make things more convenient for patients by pre-boiling the prescribed ingredients to make packets of dark, syrupy concentrate that the patients then take by the spoonful. From a prescription, the ingredients are tossed together on to a clean cheesecloth (this process seemed rather haphazard, involving handfuls rather than a graduated cylinder or electronic balance). The bundle is placed in a bag in a big metal urn with holes like a sieve, and the top is covered with more cheesecloth. In another room (that really smells like an apothecary's shop), the urns are placed inside glass containers which are filled with water. The whole outfit is then boiled for 1-3 hours to distill (presumably) the essences of the ingredients, which are decanted into jars or bags that are given to the patient. Scorpion soup, anyone?

Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble...

We continued the tour upstairs where there is a traditional Chinese medical clinic that offers treatments such as acupuncture, cupping, moxibustion, etc. Again, the rooms had interesting juxtapositions: standard-issue hospital beds and a nice window view, but instead of a model skeleton in the corner, there was a small model on the desk showing the various chi lines and nodes. The stainless steel trays and individually-sealed packets followed standard hygienic protocol, but the trays held rows of glass domes and the packets had super-fine acupuncture needles of varying lengths.

For those who might dismiss all this as superstitious nonsense, consider the training that the Chinese doctors must go through, which is fairly comparable to what I'll be starting next year at NYU. The attending physician we spoke to had gone through five years of training, then since he wanted to practice in Macau, he had to work as a sort of intern/resident for 1-2 years before getting his official certification. Also, 5000+ years of observation must have come up with some sort of insights and semi-effective treatment, otherwise people wouldn't still be using it, right?

MUST is also trying to adapt traditional practices to Western ideals of "scientific medicine" through standardizing treatments and drug dosages, as well as introducing some fancy new machines, like this one, which is supposed to show which of the six major systems is out of balance based on measurements of surface temperature (e.g. on palms and feet), pulse rate, blood pressure, and a few other things. I'm a little skeptical about how accurate it can be, but they're trying, at least.

The third floor we visited was the research wing, mostly used for analyzing samples of traditional medicine to determine composition and purity. For example, if the medicine is supposed to be an aphrodisiac/increase potency, did someone just add Viagra to the pill? Again, there were many interesting juxtapositions - any biochemical lab would have been justifiably proud of the state-of-the art equipment (e.g. mass chromatography machines), but the substances they were testing ranged from bits of dried leaves to pungent black liquid. Our tour guide, one of the researchers, mentioned that they were also trying to get approval for clinic trials on the efficacy of traditional Chinese medicine for treating H1N1 cases, though I'm not sure if that ever got off the ground because they were planning to use MUST students as subjects, making the ethics a little murky.

Anyway, the whole tour was quite intriguing, and it helped me fulfill one of my original Fulbright side project goals of learning more about Chinese medicine. Although I still don't know enough to help me in seeing patients, e.g. figuring out what herbs a little old lady has been taking for arthritis that might interact with her other prescriptions, it was a good place to start.