An interesting account about a woman’s experience using Chinese herbal teas to help treat her daughter’s epilepsy:
“We get the herbs from our Chinese doctor, Joy Jin, a tiny, middle-aged woman who speaks passable English and, like all Chinese doctors, is prone to blunt pronouncements that somehow don’t offend. When I first began brewing the teas in the hope of stopping some of my daughter’s seizures, I was worried that I might do her some sort of harm. Dr. Jin assured me that the teas were “dangerous for you, not for Sophie.”
This was in keeping with a friend’s experience with a different Chinese doctor. That wise woman had continuously admonished my friend against an earlier brain surgery done on her own epileptic infant daughter. “Why you cut open her brain? That’s terrible,” she said, every time my friend brought her daughter for a visit.
The surgery had been unsuccessful, and my friend regretted it to a sickening degree. However, the criticism was so blunt and honest that it was hysterical to us.
Neurologists, on the other hand, have great difficulty voicing their opinions, especially when they don’t know what in the world is going on with their patients’ brains. That had been our experience, anyway.
I dutifully reported to Sophie’s neurologist that I was taking her to a Chinese doctor and giving her herbal teas. Dr. T., a comfortingly disheveled doctor whom I had chosen to follow my daughter’s progress after a long string of arrogant, best-in-the-field physicians, commented in her gentle British accent, “Well, they couldn’t possibly be any more dangerous than the stuff we’ve been forcing down her throat for six years.”
Chinese herbs are brewed twice. The first time, I open the bag into a nonmetallic pot and cover the mixture with water. Dust and pollen-like fragments float to the surface; I push them down with a wooden spoon and turn on the gas.
When the water begins to boil, I turn down the heat, and they simmer for 45 minutes. During this time, the odor is so intense that I usually open the windows and, weather permitting, the doors. It always crosses my mind that a neighbor or passerby, assailed by an almost visible smell, will think I’m making some sort of drug.
After trying more than 15 anti-epileptic drugs with no success, Sophie continues to endure multiple seizures a day. Yet I have still felt compelled to defend to my friends and family the unorthodox treatment I’m now pursuing. It’s simpler to justify the hideous side effects of the accepted protocol than the benefits of the unproved.
The reverence with which I prepare this tea is such that I use the same pot, the same strainer, the same bowl and the same pitcher. I believe, as I brew the herbs. I believe. I believe that they will help her, that they are invested with the power of ancient wisdom and that if I do it correctly, with faith, they will work.”
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