Expat, Heal Thyself: A Guide to the Chinese Hospital

Expat, Heal Thyself: A Guide to the Chinese Hospital
Oct 05, 2013 By Alia Scanlon , eChinacities.com

With any luck, you will survive your stay in China without having to go to the hospital.  Stay long enough, however, and a trip to the doctor is inevitable. Because not all of us have the financial wherewithal or access to those nice, clean, bilingual expat hospitals, here is a brief guide to your trip to your friendly local Chinese hospital!  Ready?  Here we go.

The mysterious street meat you thought was a good idea the other night is exacting its revenge on your intestines, and after the third straight day of jettisoning your insides into the toilet, it’s time for some help. You, being clever and well-informed, know to go to the biggest hospital you can find and that the hospital (yes, the entire thing) will be closed from noon to two p.m.  You arrive early and armed with either a translator or a piece of paper with all the things that are wrong with you written down because nobody at all is going to speak English there. You are mildly appalled at how dark, crowded, and dirty the place is, but you’re a scrappy adventurer and brace yourself for the experience.   

The first challenge: registering

Your first challenge is to register at the desk or window just inside the entrance. Look for signage that says “guahao” (挂号).  Like anywhere else in China, there are no real queues, and the elderly, people in uniform, and those with small children expect to go first, so you get knocked out of the way a few times before you get to the window. They give you a card to fill out with your name (if you can, use a Chinese one) and your age, gender, phone number, and address. They also want to know which department you need to see, and this is where you break out your handy written description of your ailment. They take your info and your registration fee (a few RMB) and give you a little booklet, a receipt, and a card. 

The second challenge: finding the correct doctor

The second challenge is finding the correct department and the correct doctor. The hospital is an Escher-inspired labyrinth and people are less than helpful about directions. Fortunately, a lot of the signage is in something approximating English, and you can always show somebody your receipt which states the department. You join the crowd (again, not a queue) around the doctor’s cubicle and manoeuvre your way to the front.

The third challenge: the examination

The third challenge is the examination itself, or, more specifically, making the surly, overworked doctor understand what the problem is. Whip out your written description, make exuberant gestures and draw pictures. Do a little dance. Whatever it takes. The doctor take notes in your little booklet, swipes your card, and orders up some tests that are probably unnecessary but keep the hospital in business. Now you have to find the payment window (it probably says “shou fei,” or收费) where they swipe your card and you receive another receipt after paying the lab fee. Now you’re off to find the lab, give them their samples, and wait for the results. With luck, the tests your doctor ordered will be ready within an hour or so. So you wait and take the opportunity to sit back and observe the compelling mayhem that is the Chinese hospital.

After you pick up your results, you return to the doctor, hoping that he or she won’t try to hospitalize you. Sometimes they want to hook you up to an IV for a day or two to milk you for cash, and you aren’t prepared to share a room with lots of ill strangers their families and pony up more cash than you want to spend.  Luckily, this time the doctor simply writes a prescription in your booklet, swipes your card, writes in your booklet some more, and sends you to the payment desk again, where you pay, get a receipt, have your card swiped, ad infitium

The fourth challenge: getting the correct meds

Now you can go to the pharmacy, which is divided into Chinese and Western medicine counters. You know that it is generally unadvisable to take the two kinds of medicines together because of poorly understood drug interactions, but doctors here love to over-prescribe. You ignore the Chinese medicine unless you know exactly what it is and go for whatever Western medicine they give you.  Again, over-prescription is a huge problem, so you receive three different types of antibiotics and some mysterious other pills that you will go home and research before taking, because, frankly, the internet is about as good a doctor as the one you just saw.

And now dear expat, go ahead and congratulate yourself on your weird new adventure, go home, and heal thyself.

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Keywords: Chinese hospital guide to Chinese hospital

1 Comments

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coineineagh

Traditional medicine is usually a boiled black liquid from liquorice and other dried forest herbs, and the strong bitter flavour is a good indicator that it's probably healthy for you. It's worthwhile to get some from a local pharmacy if you have a cough. But avoid hospitals like they are the plague, because they are! Chinese hospitals are all about making money off of gullible local hypochondriacs, and I wouldn't advise anyone go there unless it's a serious emergency. And you shouldn't go in with only a note; you need a trustworthy person to translate everything for you, and keep an eye out for exploitation attempts. Even my in-laws got swindled out of 2000 for pricy & useless meds while nursing students were using my baby boy's hands, legs and skull for venipuncture practice. If like in the article, you just got a bout of the runs from what you're confident is food poisoning, then I wouldn't even consider going there. All the sick people with actual respiratory infections will increase your chances of contracting something nasty rather than curing whatever thing you came in for. Despite all of China leaving windows open in all temperatures, they keep the windows of crowded sick wards tightly shut - the one situation when it actually is useful to keep air clean and fresh. It's like they only worry that sick people who already have a cold might catch more of a cold from fresh air.

Nov 30, 2013 14:38 Report Abuse