Wan Jing Hospital of the Chinese Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine

(don’t forget to also see the Wan Jing Photopage)

The Wanjing Hospital of the Chinese Academy of TCM is located northeast of Beijing city center, just outside of the 4th ring road (Beijing, a city of 15 million people, has 5 concentric beltways). It was founded as the Beijing Hospital of Acupuncture and Orthopedics and was originally a trauma and orthopedics center, but later expanded to other departments in order to meet the local community’s needs. The hospital maintains an outpatient acupuncture department (where I interned), and an inpatient acupuncture service. The outpatient service has 20 beds spread over three rooms and 2 full-time staff doctors (Prof. Xia and Dr. Hong Na). The inpatient service has 21 beds and 7 full-time staff doctors. Professor Xia was instrumental in the founding of this hospital. She was originally trained as a western physician, but later trained as a traditional Chinese medicine doctor as well, and has now been practicing TCM for 50 years. Though extremely busy, she always made time for student questions, and was very patient with the difficulties that arise from communication without a common language. Dr. Hong Na served as my unofficial translator between seeing her own patients. She was extremely generous with her time, and I owe her much gratitude for all her help and enthusiastic support.		Wan Jing Hospital began as an orthopedic hospital
Prof. Xia has a rather busy schedule and patients come from far outside the province to get treatments. In a typical day beginning at 7am, she treats up to 80 patients in a morning, breaks at 11:30 for a few hours at the Gao Bei Dian Hospital where she treats pediatric cases, then returns to Wan Jing for a late afternoon load of up to 30 patients… every day. Patients at Wan Jing range from commonly treated conditions like low back pain, cervical spondylosis, Bell’s Palsy (facial paralysis), hypertension, and CVA (stroke) recovery, to more esoteric conditions such as Myasthenia Gravis, Herpes zoster, and Parkinson’s Disease. There is also a fair amount of undiagnosed patients who come in only with symptoms (dizziness, knee pain, head ache, etc.) Patients simply walk into one of the treatment rooms, looking for an empty bed, and are treated in turn. Usually, patients come every day M-F for at least two weeks, after which they may transition to a 3x / week schedule as their condition improves. Unless it’s a first time visit or there has been a significant change or x-ray / blood test result, most patients get less than 2 minutes with Prof. Xia, as she whips through one patient after another, memorizing each patient’s condition and point prescription. Most needling sessions are punctuated with a “haole” from Xia, as she moves on to the next bed, and the one after that. Xia is assisted by either post-graduate student disciples or by her personal assistant, who hand her needles and remove needles from each patient, as necessary (usually after a 30 minute retention). Needles are of the sterilized reusable variety, and must be sorted into special bins after the pressure/heat sterilization procedure. Some patients choose to bring their own disposable needles, which cost about 20 yuan for a box of 100. Acupuncture is sometimes combined with tuina massage (through referrals to the tuina department) or Chinese herb prescriptions, which are filled at the TCM pharmacy. The hospital also has a service where herbs in any prescription can be combined as raw ingredients, boiled in special cheesecloth vats, and packaged in sealed plastic bags to be ingested as teas at a later time. Treatments run based on a menu of services: Acupuncture = 13 Yuan / session; Moxa = 10 Yuan / box of 6 poles; Herbs = ~10 Yuan / day (varies); Tuina = 30 – 50 Yuan / session. [n.b. 1 US$ = 8.2 Yuan]
	In the afternoon, Prof. Xia is whisked away to the Gao Bei Dian Hospital in the far eastern part of the city. The hospital provides car and driver. She sees only pediatric cases at this hospital, such as cerebral palsy, and Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy. The Gao Bei Dian hospital is in a more suburban part of town, and has only recently been remodeled from a simple clinic. Here, patients are given semi-private rooms and the facilities in general appear to be more comfortable, although the cost to the patient is the same as at Wan Jing hospital. On the day I visited this hospital, there were only 4 patients to be seen, though the summer time, with its school vacation, brings in more patients, as families and children have more time for medical care. Professor Xia has achieved some good results for patients with DMD and CP, with a combination of acupuncture, herbs, and exercise therapy. In fact, pediatric patients come in from as far away as Canada and Europe. Some patients have already been to many different hospitals and have been subjected to various diagnostic tests and therapies, some of which have led to more harm than good. Perhaps one of the chief strengths of Xia’s treatments is that side effects are rare and very minimal, thus, when coupled with the relatively low cost of treatment, few patients leave her care unhappy.
All in all, interning at Wan Jing Hospital has been a very worthwhile experience. I came here with some definite ideas on what TCM is like in modern-day China (see “Chinese Medicine in Contemporary China” by Volker Scheid for a good anthropological study). Some came out to be quite true, such as the concerted push for modernization and integration of TCM with Western medicine, while others proved to be misconceptions (no, patients do not come in to the doctor complaining of “damp heat in their lower warmer”; this kind of vocabulary seems to be dying out amongst the lay people). As China, the country, modernizes and opens to the west; TCM is also changing in order to maintain an integrated place in China’s medical system.

| Wan Jing Photopage | Main |