Chinese Medi-sin

I've had a death hack for a week and a half now so on Tuesday I finally succumbed to peer pressure and went to see a Chinese herbalist.  Here is a shot of the office:

If you look closely, you might notice some antlers and dried sea horses. The other things are unidentifiable but I don't think you can get much worse than that.

I hope?

In the drawers in the back they keep the rest of the more boring looking herbs, which they hand measure onto plastic sheets with the scale hanging in the upper right corner of the picture.

Anyway, I saw the doctor and he wrote down my diagnosis and treatment in Chinese.   Luckily I had a colleague help me translate it as follows:

Diagnosis: Lungs are totally effed.
Treatment:  Make her drink some really nasty tasting sh!t so she doesn't come back because we can't really do anything about it.

The doctor's assistant told me to return in an hour and a half to pick up my turpentine-oil-blood-salt-anise-licorice-animal hide-radish tea after it was done boiling (one for after lunch and one for after dinner). 

It kind of looks like...well...nevermind.

I was a little hesitant to drink it since I'd heard from all of the assistants in our office that it tasted terrible. However, I figured that they were wusses and that it probably wasn't that bad.  Below: my it's-probably-not-that-bad face.

Unfortunately, I was 1,000,000% without a doubt emphatically wrong on that point.  This stuff is TERRIBLE.  After my first taste, I decided I'd rather just die of pneumonia.  However, stubbornness eventually kicked in and I made it through the first day's ration.  On the second day I went back to get my next dose, only this time they gave me some candies to help take away the taste.  I think they didn't give me any on the first day to see if I would still come back.

Below: Haw flakes (kind of like soft Necco wafers made of crab apples) and sweetened dried plum (doesn't taste much better than the tea itself).

Actually they do help take away some of the burning dead human taste, but not all of it.  

The most fun part about this whole experience (to the extent there is one) is the look on the other patients' faces when we all go to pick up our medicines after lunch.  I also like how the doctor thinks I'm funny and doesn't believe me that I'm following his advice to only eat bread and not drink any cold drinks.  Which is weird, because I'm not.