Don’t tell anyone, but I’m on a diet. You could call it the “iPhone diet” because I’m using one of the many applications (iTunes link) for my iPhone to track daily calorie intake. My plan is to eat whatever I want while accurately recording everything, which will help me identify the stuff I’ve been eating that’s the most harmful. To help me out, my wife bought some bad-tasting medicine, saying, “Now, this is kampo, so it will definitely work.” A word that literally means “Chinese way,” kampo refers to the traditional herbal medicine of China, and it occupies an almost mythical place in the minds of the Japanese, in effect being a complete class of medical science that’s separate from Western medicine. Many products, from energy drinks to various “enhancers” to Yomeshu (a kind of medicinal sake loaded with Chinese herbs) advertise themselves as making use of the magical power of kampo to relieve symptoms. Many kampo medicines have the full backing of the medical community here, and health insurance even covers them. In the U.S., however, traditional Chinese medicines are completely ignored by almost every major company. It’d be interesting if there were some really effective drugs sitting right under our noses that have been in use in China for thousands of years.
