Chinese Medical Methods: Proceed With Caution

This is a weird entry, especially considering the fact that I'm posting this on Christmas. I was originally going to write about something completely different, but this was remarkable enough in my eyes to make me change my plans.

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First of all, and I don't know whether this makes it better or worse, really, but I don't want to dissuade anyone from trying Traditional Chinese Medicine at all - I have been pleasantly surprised by Chinese medicine more than once, and I don't intend on giving up on it at all.

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But from the beginning:

This weekend, I finally had the chance to see Skye and her family again. Even though we live in the same city, between my lecture-filled weekends, Skye’s short stay in Thailand, and 30 kilometres between my campus and her flat, I hadn’t gone to see them since the beginning of October.

(Even though I’m used to it, the proportions of everything here can still be quite overwhelming. I found out at dinner the other night that the residential estate where Skye lives with her husband is home to approximately ten thousand people!)

In her usual manner, Skye was absolutely lovely and invited me to a sauna close to her home. It was in a hairdresser’s backroom, but the decorations were decidedly fancy (or maybe it just seemed like that to me because I'm rather used to the wooden optic...)

In the sauna

That isn't the shocking part of the story, though. 

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"You look as though you've been abused!" Flo told me, quite shocked, when I showed him my neck during our weekly videochatting session. 

He isn't wrong. My neck looks bruised and a little bit terrifying.

You see, after the sauna, Skye took me upstairs for a medical massage. One thing upfront, I love getting massages in China, and I used to get them quite often back in 2012. But I have never experienced anything like this.

Anyway, when Skye told me it was a medical massage, I should probably already have felt alarmed. Back when I was still staying with her family this summer, Skye went for a medical massage due to problems with her shoulder and came back with terribly bruised arms. 

But I had totally forgotten about that.

It was the most brutal facial and neck massage I have ever received in my life, but at the time, while it did hurt, it wasn't actually that painful, and I would never have guessed that it would leave any kind of mark. I had my eyes closed, so I don't know for sure what the masseuse did, but here's part of the result (as Skye took pictures during the massage process, for some unfathomable reason):

The dangers of massages

And now picture this, but covering basically my entire neck...

However, to end this story on a positive note: My neck has not felt this free of tension in a long time, so it was worth it in the end...

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I wish everyone Happy Holidays and a wonderful last week of 2018!