Thursday, May 19, 2011

Staying Healthy (Caution: Graphic medical image.. discretion adviced)

Being an MBA (gosh, I sound so like someone else in the team when I say that), I understand fully well the power of Marketing and proper product Positioning with the possibility to sell almost any snake oil as a cure for cancer. Home brewed toilet cleaner can be sold as connoisseur liqueur (more about Chinese liquor later sometimes), and strange goods/services can be sold as cultural novelties. 

In China, almost anything can be sold as 'Chinese Medicine'. Strange blobs in food items, weird tasting not-so-green-teas, etc are often vaguely explained away as Chinese Medicine and people happily spend money on these. 

My latest experience was the Chinese cupping 'massage' that involves placing hot glass tumblers on 'pressure points' on one's back and claims to suck out the 'impurities' in one's body. The novelty doesn't end there... this strange kinky practice tends to leave dark burn marks on the back that stick around for a lot many days - the darker the spots, the more you have apparently been rid of your ailments. These are a walking statement of having indulged... something that strangely makes me think about how a hickey on the neck also screams a a story of indulgence.

Like a photograph with the Statue of Liberty in New York, the Eiffel tower in Paris and the Taj Mahal in Agra is a must-do tick mark in the little black book, similarly a picture post-cupping is a must do in China. Against my better judgement, and with emphatic caution to my esteemed readers, I share this picture of partial nudity, from a purely educational perspective and urge my audience not to treat this as titillation.

(here is a link to anther blog I once wrote on what I feel about such pictures landing up on the internet).

The tell tale marks. The psychedelic background is only for additional dramatization
I have heard that another form of Chinese medication involves wearing edible chocolate flavored essentials, being chained to a bed, alternately being lashed with a leather whip and tickled with a peacock feather followed by further advanced intensive treatment. Need to find more about this... am sure I would have some measure of the disorder this treatment claims to cure.

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