Balance

Woke up this morning with a sore throat and lay there wondering what I could shuffle around, work wise, if it gets worse and I have to stay home sick. Then I decided I was being too negative; what’s the point about fretting about what could happen? If I do take a sickie in the next few days it will be the first in ages – I went through all of last year without a single sick day!

I think the sore throat – dry and painful when I swallow, but I haven’t got a cough – is the sort that would be diagnosed by my grandmother as a manifestation of my being too ‘heaty’. How do I define this word? It’s been quite warm here in Perth over the last few days, but my condition (if that’s what it is) doesn’t really have anything to do with external temperatures. Rather it’s that my inner temperature has become unbalanced and too ‘hot’.

Of course, the Internet has something to contribute – see this definition of ‘heatiness’. This is a concept from traditional Chinese medicine – where foods can have an effect on your inner balance and temperature, and too much of the wrong types of food can make you either ‘heaty’ or ‘cold’. Either condition is undesirable as it is unbalanced. And from Asiaweek:

Chinese medicine believes that disturbance of equilibrium is the basic cause of ill health and is therefore mainly interested in keeping balance.

Heat and cold are the primary forces within the body. The yin and yang concepts in Chinese philosophy, representing the elements of maleness and femaleness, tie in neatly with the principles of “heatiness” (yang) and “coolness” (yin). An excess of heatiness produces a feeling of unpleasant warmth, stickiness of the eyes and dark urine. Too much coolness brings the reverse, and a sense of lassitude. Both are mediated by qi, roughly translated as life-force. Certain foods and herbs are hot or heaty, others cooling. Chilies, fried fish and meat belong to the former category; cucumber, leafy vegetables and green tea to the latter. An increase of qi is controlled by consuming cooling foods and herbs, and a decrease by taking heaty ones. Attempts to isolate the precise chemicals that separate the two classes of foods have failed so far. While statistical analysis can indicate whether a drug lowers cholesterol, no one has been able to prove if something as intangible as qi has increased and what effect a cooling potion has on it.

But a system is not always invalidated because it defies scientific analysis. Many patients present symptoms for which no physical basis can be found. Besides, Chinese physicians have thousands of years of tradition and cultural compliance to strengthen their hand. Western doctors sometimes regard traditional medicine with contempt; they view it as an alternative to their own methods. This is not the case. No respectable Chinese physician would claim to be able to do a coronary bypass or to cure cancer. A traditional doctor said: “I don’t accept a cancer patient unless he is already on chemotherapy. I just hope my treatment will help him tolerate the drugs better.”

I don’t know how true or false (good or bad) these beliefs are, but they are very prevalent among people of Chinese ancestry in Malaysia and Singapore, and I presume in Hong Kong and Taiwan as well. They certainly had an affect on how I was cared for when I was sick as a child. To cure a ‘heaty’ sore throat you would need to consume ‘cold’ things. Now I think of it, I was almost always ‘heaty’, and condemned to a steady diet of bland steamed or boiled food, like rice porridge and barley water. No meat, no oil and absolutely no tasty fried or deep fried things – I knew I was getting better when Mum and Mama (paternal grandmother) allowed me to I started to have a bit more flavour in my food and even a bit of chicken or pork!

It’s funny how you get used to certain things, and how they even become comforting when you’re sick. Even now, whenever I have a sore throat, I tend to avoid foods that just wouldn’t be ‘right’ – like chocolate, hot chips, spicy food, alcohol, steak – and rice porridge is a comfort food. I’m certainly not qualified to be able to diagnose myself, but looking back over the last few days, I’ve definitely had an excess of junk food – fried, oily, fatty, meaty. Or maybe I’ve just got a viral or bacterial infection. Hmm. Salad sandwich for lunch today, lots of water, green tea and orange juice, and a salt water gargle.

Categories: culture, illness