Chinese medicines

My friend DD played Florence Nightingale during my recent indisposition, bringing me over some Chinese medicines (and some Western-style oral rehydration salts) to try to alleviate my crippling attack of la du zi.

One of these, alas, was a drug supposedly called Lacidophilin - which are the size of horse-pills and utterly disgusting in taste; potently emetic, in fact. And, if you do manage to keep them down (I've tried these buggers before) by breaking them up into several manageable fragments and swilling each of these down in quick succession with copious amounts of Coke or fruit juice, they seem to have absolutely no effect whatsoever.

So, my hopes for survival rested on Option No. 2 - some mysterious little silver-foil sachets, each filled with about 30 or 40 small hard round pellets (not unlike a fairly large gauge shotgun shot, in fact).

Alas, there were no instructions as to how this mysterious medicine was to be administered (DD's Chinese is very good, and she scoured all the packaging and the inserts for several minutes, until she was quite sure that the 'method of administration' section you usually find in such literature was entirely missing). I hoped it wasn't intended as a suppository. In my unhappy condition, insertion - and retention - would be a considerable problem. I found that they were in fact far more palatable to swallow dry than the wretched Lacidophilin - but somewhat fiddly, since they were so small and there were so damn many of them. Further experimentation revealed that they did dissolve fairly well in warm water, so we concluded that - as with so many Chinese medicines - they were intended to be taken as a 'tea'.

Of course, the trouble with that is that it takes you at least 20 minutes to consume a full dose (it's not emetic, but it certainly ain't pleasant); whereas with a Western drug like Immodium you can just pop one or two capsules and get on with your day, reasonably confident that the floodgates will soon close. (Why, oh why can't you get Immodium out here? I really need to re-stock next time I'm back in the UK.)

It seems to have done the trick, though. Well, kind of. I still don't feel quite right, but I've managed to get through a fairly active day without embarrassment.

There is, alas, one further unfortunate 'side effect' I have just discovered: it has somehow impregnated my tea cup with its foul taste. I've washed the bloody thing about six times now, but I just can't shift it. Strange. Worrying. What do they put in this stuff??