_{I wonder what's in these bags...}

You may remember a post from two weeks ago about how Chinese, and even white, middle class mothers in the west eat dried up human placenta in pill form in the ridiculous belief that it somehow prevents cracked feet, insomnia and, well, pretty much everything.

Add that to the concept of Killing rhinos and grinding them into a pill to help your hangover as well as pretty much everything, and you can start to see a pattern.

Well, not to shy away from the challenge of most vile things ever, traditional Chinese medicine decided one day that some body parts have been undervalued and need to be utilized. I'm going to cover a few in this post and want to focus less on the research and a little more on why. Brace yourselves:

Human Pubic Hair

Shih-Yi: Pubic hair of the male is used for snake bite. Twelve [sic] hairs held in the mouth and sucked will keep the poison from entering the viscera.

Hold 20 strands of pubic hair in the mouth, and swallow the juice. This will prevent the snake's toxin from entering the abdomen

For difficult labour, 14 hairs from the husband ashed and taken with lard in the form of a pill. Pubic hair from the female is used to treat gonorrhea and sexual diseases.

Need I say more? Well ok, if you insist

Human penis

This one is supposed to stop bleeding, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out the connection, or how one is supposed to... ingest it. I did a little digging and came across the answer in an old historical essay from the Yuan Dynasty, back in 1279-1368; The Chuogenglu (輟耕錄)' by a scholar of the time, Tao Zongyi (陶宗儀).The story is as follows:

Mr. Shen in Hangzhou was once caught in the act of raping a woman. He cut off part of his penis as a self-punishment. But the wound bled incessantly and did not heal for a month thereafter. Someone told him to find the amputated part of his penis. He found it, pounded it into powder, and took the powder by mouth with wine. After a few days, the wound healed.

It's still not clear how this rapist got from amputating his penis to blending it into his Chardonnay, or how he found his rotting penis chunk after a month, but hey.

Nowadays, the more modern understanding is that obviously, the penis becomes erect when it fills up with blood. And QI.

When that blood (and qi) is obstructed, impotence is inbound. By correcting the balance of qi by say, eating a dick, your love life can be right back on track!

Honestly it sounds like a doctor was in a particularly bad mood once upon a time and somebody took his words a little too literally.

Far more commonly, however, is Deer Penis. This must be extracted from a live deer, because 5,000 years of history, and then sliced into smaller pieces by women, dried and roasted. Once again, this goes with wine and prevents injuries, something that was unfortunately banned during the 2008 Olympics.

It's also said to help with pregnancy which might have gone well with the Donkey Skin Glue from last week to prevent miscarriaiges. If you're particularly rich and need a virility boost, go with turtle and even tiger penis.

Feces

Given that animals excrete fecal matter to expel the body of waste and toxic material, it only makes sense that said material is useful in medicine. After all, elephants re-digest their feces, so why not us??

But rather than eat our own shit, which would be totally gross (Even though human fecal transplants for bacteriotherapy are an actual medical thing), why not go with flying squirrel feces? I guess this would probably cure... let's see... oh, I don't know, menstruation and chest pain? Sounds good!

Seriously, this commonly prescribed 'medicine' is first collected as droppings, dried and its 'impurities' removed (it's unclear what impurities is referring to, exactly), condensed into pellets and then eaten as is, roasted or dunked in vinegar. Classy.

Two common problems I have with this, aside from being stupid, are once again:

• Somebody has actually had to do the research on this
• Squirrels are being captured and who knows what else for the trouble

So let's say this works and really does go straight to the 'meridians of liver and spleen' and the qi rebalances your body, acting like ibuprofen. That's great! But there is a tiny issue of Rickettsia infection, or Typhus, a very dangerous and often fatal disease to humans, that has been directly associated with ingesting squirrel droppings.

Inhalation and transdermal or mucous membrane inoculation of infected louse feces are well-established routes of pathogen transmission during epidemics of human louse-borne typhus.

Still, worth it!

Poo Tea

_{Pretty sure it's gonna be darker than that...}

Some people struggle to take pills. Others have achy bones, skin problems and cancer, and need an immediate cure. This is where tea made from the shit of goats and cows comes in. This one isn't so much an attempt at a scientific discovery, and more something local villagers swear by based purely on anecdote, but I felt it important to provide an eye-opening view on just why people believe in this stuff.

Way back in my first Chinese Pseudoscience post, I went into the history of TCM, and emphasised how, even though ancient scholars dismissed TCM as worthless superstition for the most part, it was brought back in the era of Mao Zedong to shut up the millions of Chinese who could not get any access to western medical care.

Rather than just tell them they've no choice but to die from this slight infection, why not tell them to chew on a leaf to balance their yin/yang?

Well, the Mao era is over, but the practice, and the financial inequality, is not. China's rural areas comprises of about 590 million people, or twice the population of the USA. Yet only 20% of health services in the country can be found here. Add to this obvious problem that most rural citizens can't afford the transport and other expenses, and suddenly the stuff you find in a field or up a tree doesn't seem so unappealing to fix your ailments.

So many villages come up with countless folk-tales over the generations and thanks to confirmation bias, swear by anything that loosely correlated with some fortunate outcome 40 years ago that one time, while dismissing the times their cure-all ideas did absolutely nothing or lead to infection. Must have been bad qi.

If you're still a believer and happened to come across a world of wealth, why not upgrade to panda poo tea for only $190 per cup? This world's most expensive tea is said to have 'a mature and nutty taste' and can, of course, prevent cancer.

Sigh.

That's enough for now

This is probably more than you can...swallow for one day, so I'll leave it to brew in your mind and come back to some more wonders of TCM next week. And if you feel sick after reading this, visit your (western-trained) doctor!

Images CC0 licensed

Sources: _{Squirrel Shit | Squirrel Typhus | Poo Tea | Pubic Hair | Chinese Literature resource}