By continuing you agree to eChinacities's Privacy Policy .
Sign up with Google
Sign up with Facebook
Q: Do any of the Chinese old wives tales have truth in them?
Ok maybe I'm being a bit culturally insensitive by calling them old wives tales, but I hope you know what I mean. The logic behind catching a cold, drinking hot water, the whole "Shang/Xia Huo" thing about hot and cold energy in your body... there are many others. What do you think?
Imagine you are sitting in a remote village 200 years ago. Education is close to non-existing. If you get sick, the risk of dying is very high. All these old wives tales have probably been a good guideline for surviving in old days. In modern society they mainly serve as a way for fraudsters to sell useless stuff to gullible people.
Actually, the hot water makes sense even today. Boiled water is usually hot (unless you let it cool) so drinking hot or boiled water is healthier than slurping it from the stream, river, lake or )today) Fawcett.
It probably also soothes hunger pangs and what not if you cannot afford (in that ancient village) tea or soup.
Scandinavian:
if you have clean water there is no health benefit to boiling and drinking it warm
Nessquick:
yes, but when someone tell you, that pure hot water is better than black tea with lemon and honey, than there is something wrong 
Scandinavian:
in old days, very easy, rivers would be a source of clean water. today, in China, impossible, but many places in the world you can get clean spring water from nature that requires no cleaning before drinking.
i have known some chinese who want wear glasses because grandma told them their eyes will get worse and they will have to pay for new glasses every year. so after hearing this from a short sighted chinese girl that want wear glasses that i offered to pay for, i said 'so all people who wear glasses are rich or stupid or both' , she says 'yes'. i live in the twilight zone, i knew watching night gallery would give me bad karma.
I think even western medicine had many misnomenclature, and misconceptions over the centuries. For example the word "malaria" means bad air, because people believed malaria was due to breathing bad air, but today we know the disease is caused by parasite transmitted by mosquito bite. Ancient British sailors and explorers couldn't figure out what was causing their symptoms of bleeding gums and poor wound healing when they sail in the sea for too long, but they found out eating lemon would solve the problem, so they called the disease "scurvy", eventually it was proven that scurvy was due to vitamin C defiency, and since lemon is rich in vitamin C, eating it would cure the disease.
In China there are still many such misbeliefs, for example "shang huo" means getting symptoms of peptic ulcers, it is equivalent to the English word "heartburn", but the problem is people don't try to find any scientific truth to whatever they say, they just claim eating or doing a certain thing will cause a certain problem. It seems too medeival!
