recurring back pain

think i'm really getting old. tried to reach my usual mileage last week and spent the weekend mostly in bed trying to recover from a really sore back. maybe it's that cupboard that did it. whatever, it is, it doesn't feel nice to know that i'm not a teenager anymore and there will probably be no more 8-minute 2.4km runs for me. you know, it's funny how we trade physical prowess for wisdom as we age but wisdom is seldom celebrated in this society, where older workers are shunned even if they ask for lower wages.

went to the National Library @ Bras Basah with wifey over the weekend. re-read the writings of the celebrated Dr. Benjamin Spock. funny how i used to be mocked for reading his books during my paediatrics posting so many years ago. that they were "quasi-scientific" or that they didn't help in managing patients. which brings me to this point: medical education did NOT help much in making me a better care-giver to the community. they didn't teach what stuff to do in everyday situations, like what should a parent do when the kid has high fever (simplistic answer: go to the doctor). solution? i learnt it from somewhere else: 5 towels and a lullaby. recovering from a watery diarrhoea? Eat more fibre.

simple steps to health which no one bothers with anymore. western medical education's emphasis is on curing sickness, not on maintainence of normal health. it assumes that we don't have to do anything to our bodies until we fall sick. the real thing should be one of active attitudes in our everyday lives to maintain health. more often than not, we fall sick when we don't do anything. to put it another way: we do something only after we fall sick.

i've been re-looking at Chinese culture in general after taking a more-than-casual interest in traditional chinese medicine (TCM). you know, TCM got a real pounding and was labeled as a "witch-science" during my years in med school. but let's take a step back and look at the 5000 years of history that it has. i think the problem arose out of a mis-understanding of concepts and emphasis.

western medicine = intervention during illness
TCM = daily maintainence of normal health

one of the problem with me and i suspect with most folks is that i don't take note of my health until something happens. for example, i've been watching my diet and getting enough vitamins for the past 2 years. the consequence of that? only 2 bouts of illness, one influenza (which may have been caused by not washing hands), the other food poisoning (not my fault). whereas i got sick almost every quarterly for as long as i remember before i started watching what i eat.

well, perhaps this marks a return to my roots as a Han/Cantonese Chinese? visited the exhibition about Zheng He at the library. can't help feeling that i've been throwing away my heritage with all those years spent emulating Americans. why at this point in my life? nothing dramatic. it all started with a small book titled "1421: the year China discovered America", which alluded to the possibility that the history of the world as we know it may in fact have been wrong.

currently reading Chinese history in Chinese text (must have gone nuts, having never passed CL2 very well), started in fits and stops but managed to cover bits here and there from the Emperor of Qin (259-207BC) to General Yue Fei (AD1103-1142) of Sung. what i hope to do ultimately is to dig back even further to the era of Huang Ti (c. 2600BC) and perhaps learn of how Chinese civilization came about after the Flood. It will probably become more legend than history, but then, history is his-STORY so who can really separate fact from fiction?