“When I was little, every summer, I’d go with my dad back to his hometown to get with his side of the family. And my cheapskate dad always used the excuse that “tickets were too expensive” to leave my mom at home alone. When I saw my mom send me off with a smile, I always felt bad for her.
Thirty years later, when I became a mother, I knew exactly how she felt at the time. She was smiling from the bottom of her heart.”
Comments say, “Don’t have to take care of the kid and don’t have to look at your husband? This is heaven.”
“You can always smile if you never marry.”
“Reminds me of a blogger whose mom kept pushing her to get married, so she asked her mom, “What about your marriage makes you happy?” And her mom says, “I’m happy all the time, like when your dad isn’t home.””
“A little PSA in the middle of the night.
Once rabies is symptomatic, it’s incurable. It has a 100% death rate. Please take it seriously.
The 10 day observation method refers to starting your rounds of vaccines immediately after getting bitten by cats or dogs, while observing the animal that bit you. If nothing happens to the cat and dog within 10 days, you can consider not getting followup shots, although its’ still not recommended. Because America doesn’t have a big problem with rabies—at least not as much as China—so the CDC’s 10 day observation method doesn’t include getting the vaccine first. I don’t know how this circulated around the internet and became “You can wait 10 days before getting a vaccine if you get bitten.” That’s caused a lot of unnecessary deaths.
Just a reminder for everyone to not gamble with your life. You can have your opinions about whether you like cats or dogs. That’s your right. But you don’t need to gamble with your life and you shouldn’t be irresponsible with your life.
As soon as you get scratched by a cat or dog, immediately go get a vaccine, and get the protein shot too. ASAP, that way, the antibodies start working right away.”
Comments say, “Cool fact: Every year, over 100 people die of rabies in China. At the same time, over 7000 people die choking on their food.”
“Rabies spread through the saliva of a sick animal mixing with your wound. The chances of getting rabies from a cat scratch is almost zero. And if it’s your own pet act and dog who’s already had a rabies shot, then you don’t need another vaccine even with a bite. You only have to get the vaccine if you get bitten by a stray, just in case.”
“No wonder 80% of the world’s vaccines end up inside Chinese people.”
A fitness coach responds to the question, “When I can eat what I want to eat?”
His reply is, “Well, I mean, it’s not about when you can eat what you want. It’s that you should only eat when you want to. The problem is that people are eating all day long. They’re spending all their time wanting food. That’s the problem.
I think a big misconception people have is that when they gain weight, when they pack on chub on their tummy, they get the misconception that, “Man, how am I supposed to stay away from all these tasty snacks?” I mean, you’ve never stayed away, right? When have you ever stayed away? When have you ever turned down snacks? Just thinking about not eating puts you in a bad mood, right? You’ll diet, and you’ll diet, and you’ll end up going right back to food.
A lot of people are like this. They’re like, “Oh, that guy has such a great physique. How did he do it?” They did it with will power. By resisting their temptations. They just make it look easy. It’s true.
Some of them might be naturally thin, or maybe that’s their default eating habits. But what you want isn’t to be thin. It’s to be thin where it counts and muscular where it counts. You’re working out because you want to look good. So you have to constantly deny yourself.”
Comments say, “But I deny myself for 4-5 hours between every meal.”
“Alright, there’s nothing I want to read here.”
“It’s true—you don’t get fat in a day, you get fat day after day.” [You don’t get fat in a day is the Chinese version of “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”]
A compilation of gay people talking about their encounters using food euphemisms:
“Met a 180cm+ super hot Shangdong chef, crew cut, tall nose bridge, great physique. But when my food was serve, I raised the li, and it was a plate of garlic enoki. It was as thin and soft and limp as my hair.”
“181 student athlete with okay looks. I was just super hungry at the time and wanted someone to cook with. But he doesn’t know how to do fucking anything except sauté. All the juices have been cooked out, and he’s still sautéing. He cooks for a long time, but it’s still pointless, there’s no skill in it. So, bye.”
“I’ve had Starbucks from a 186cm, but it was really small. From that point on, I had a certain stereotype for 180+ people.”
“Got food from a 185cm, and he was done cooking in three minutes flat. I didn’t even have time to pick up my chopsticks. And he’s so sensitive. He won’t let any of the ingredients move around. He only wants to cook with dead fish. That’s the only way he can ensure his time. Otherwise, he might be ready to serve in three seconds.”
Comments say, “Hahahahaha fuck. When I saw that first post, I really thought they were talking about chefs and food.”
“Too much vertical growth can limit the size of lower branches [Doge]”
“I’ve always heard that 172-178cm men have the biggest hahahaha.”
“I’ve discovered that a lot of regions have, like, commoner food and government food. Or, rather, it’s poor people food and rich people food.
Poor people just take a bunch of cheap ingredients and use it as thoroughly as they could, and as time passes, it becomes a delicacy, like the Ximeng fried chicken I ate yesterday was created by local farmers. It’s not actually an official part of Shandong cuisine. Shandong cuisine used to be the official Imperial Food back in the day—all the dishes like Braised Intestine or Sea Cucumber with Green Onions only started appearing on normal people’s tables recently.
It’s the same in Beijing—marinaded and stir-fried liver versus Peking Duck.
And in Sichuan—all kinds of boiled offal versus Cabbage in Boiled Water. [A dish that sounds really sad but is actually a completely clear broth made from boiling all kinds of expensive ingredients over a whole day…with cabbages in it.]
How did it take me so long to figure this out?
Because we don’t have this difference in Dongbei. Poor people and rich people eat the exact same twice-cooked pork and chicken mushroom stew.”
Comments say, “Dongbei is a major food producer but there’s not a lot of variety. It’s too cold for any real delicacies to have developed. Back in the day, even if you were super rich, there’s nowhere to go to buy sea cucumbers and nowhere to roast ducks. So everyone eats chicken mushroom stew.”
“Hahahaha I’ve lived in Shandong for 15 years and I’ve never had Braised Intestine or Sea Cucumber with Green Onions.”
“This is why I fucking love Dongbei. It’s my second home <3 Who knows the pain of eating twice-cooked pork in the south and it’s expensive as shit and they only give you like two slices of meat.”
“Dongbei totally has rich people food too, like bear paw or deer tail. It’s just that it’s all illegal now.”
An askreddit question, “How can Chinese Medicine doctors back in the day tell what condition you have just from taking your pulse? What’s the science behind it?”
The top-voted reply is, “I’m a complete beginner, self-teaching myself how to read pulses. I’ve been studying Chinese medicine for 6-7 years, and I still can’t do anything about my fatty liver.
I’ve been spending all my time trying to figure out taking pulse, but because there’s no one to teach me, I was always confused about one thing or another.
For example, I’ve always been curious why my pulse is different in my left arm and my right arm.
I only figured out the answer in my 8th year of study.
When I went home that day, my mom told me, “Your grandma keeps feeling like there’s something on her mouth. Go see what’s wrong?”
So I put my hand on her pulse, and I’ve felt pulses many times before, but every time, I didn’t have any idea what I was looking for. I didn’t understand what I was feeling at all.
But after some studying, I had a little bit of a concept of what I was doing, and I was able to make some educated guesses. So I carefully felt her pulse.
She had a very strong pulse beat, and it felt really hard. I counted, and her pulse was beating at over 100 times per minute.
I sank into thought, analysing to myself.
This is an old lady nearly 80. If she was a healthy old lady, as her heart declines, her heart rate should become slower than the average person, usually below 70, and usually not nearly as powerful as young people. But her pulse today was the complete opposite. 100 beats per minute and very strong pulse.
What does this mean?
Does it mean that her body is even healthier than a young person? That her heart is stronger?
No way that’s possible.
So, there’s only one explanation.
There must be heat in her body.
And the strong pulse means that there’s pressure inside her arteries which is ever increasing.
So another problem comes to me. If there is heat, is it real heat or false heat?
Here, another indicator drew my attention. Her artery felt very hard.
The hardness of the artery told me that it’s lost its flexibility. So, undoubtedly, we’re dealing with false heat here.
Her pulse in both hands was powerful, and the pressure was bigger the higher up I went.
Chinese Medicine calls this a “tightly-strung bow.”
So I considered to myself, “What is going on?”
The pressure in the blood is pressing the artery, and the upper part of the artery has more pressure than the lower part. So what’s the highest up?
The head.
My heart went cold. Could it be a stroke?
I immediately asked, “Grandma, do you have a headache?”
My grandma responded, “No, not really, I just this ringing in my brain, like someone’s talking to me.”
I immediately looked up info, and based on her symptoms and her pulse, I found that it was exactly the same as what Zhang Xichun [Chinese medicine scholar back in the turn of the century] said. That people who present a “tightly-strung bow” in both arms has a stroke according to Chinese Medicine.
I was even more confident in my conclusion. That this was a mini-stroke. The kind that hasn’t affected anything. So I told my mom to take her to the hospital.
My mom found my uncle and took my grandma to a hospital where they had connections, and ran a bunch of tests. The doctor told my mom to leave and talked one-on-one with my uncle. When he returned, he had a CT scan in his hands, and said that at the base of the brain, there’s a small blood clot. If we wait any longer, it might turn into a real stroke. We have to be very careful. And as he explained, he wondered how we discovered it.
As I listened along, I was buzzing with excitement. So this is how pulses worked.
So I kept thinking to myself, thinking to myself just what is going on here? Until one day, while I was waiting on a red light, a thought came into my head. Just what determines whether people live or die? Organ failure? Cancer? No, that’s not it.
Looking across the world, the only thing that really kills people is acute conditions, like a stroke.
Based on western medical theory, it’s caused by a blocked blood vessel.
That made me realise right away, that the core of what determines whether people live or die is the health of their blood vessels. If the blood vessels become blocked, it’s too much and you die. If the blood vessels become too weak, then it’s too little and you die.
And every other illness and condition out there is just an extension of what is going on in the arteries.
The heart delivers the blood. It flows through the blood vessels, and transports energy endlessly around the body, forming the organs.
That moment, I finally realised. The pulse is a way to detect what is going on in the blood vessels, and thus detecting what is going on with your supply of energy.
That’s why we have to put our hand on the pulse point. If blood is flowing too slowly, then it’s not efficient enough, people don’t get enough energy. If you have weak smooth muscles, then your blood vessels are too hard. Everything is reflected in the blood vessels.
Maybe ancient people didn’t really understand all this, but they still grasped the core of the issue.
If someone’s been sickly for years, and all of a sudden, he’s looking rosy and glowing, then the doctor would take his pulse. And this pulse is very strong, beating very fast, so a bad doctor might say, “This person is healthy.”
But a good doctor would hesitate. He would take the pulse again, and find that even if he presses down very hard, this person’s artery doesn’t have any give at all.
This means that the artery is empty. The heart has no power at all.
The only reason that the pulse feels very strong is because the heart has no power, so it’s increasing the rate at which it beats. It’s struggling desperately.
So the good doctor would shake his head and understand this patient is beyond saving.
Soon, the rosy and glowing patient start not being able to breath, and then quickly dies. This is a very classic scenario of death. There’s nothing odd about it at all.
So after a long time of thinking and experimenting, I slowly grasped how to take a pulse.
There’s a really sad story that I’m not sure whether to tell.
Back in the day, the absolute top doctor Li Ke ran a bunch of experiments before he died, and he found that only 10% clinical Chinese Medicine doctors actually knew how to take a pulse. Everyone else was just blindly guessing based on patient-reported symptoms. Doctor Li Ke was absolutely devastated and knew that Chinese Medicine was doomed them.
I know exactly how he feels. Increasingly, doctors can’t tell what’s wrong with you by just taking your pulse anymore. You have to tell them your symptoms and let them look at your tongue, before they can figure out what’s wrong. Back in the day, I went to a lot of Chinese Medicine doctors too, and I find that they can’t actually come to any conclusion before I show them my tongue and tell them my symptoms.
After learning how to take a pulse, I understood that maybe it’s because my pulse confused them.
Why is my left pulse really strong but my right pulse really weak? Maybe they were just as puzzled about it as I am.
Now, I understand.
There’s a saying in Chinese Medicine, that the left hand represents blood and the right hand represents chi. It’s a very magical sounding thing, but I’ve been reading all kinds of scientific papers, trying to figure out what is going on exactly.
Until one day, I saw a live CT scan of a heart, and it astonished me.
I never thought that the heart was so powerful and so rapid while pumping out blood. Plus, most of the heart is on the left side. So I instantly understood that there’s so much power on the left side, then you’ll never discover a problem with your energy on the left side. You can only tell if there’s a problem with the composition of your blood.
The only things that can be wrong with blood basically just comes down to clotting or anaemia. The more powerfully you’re pumping out blood, the more problems with clotting or anaemia would be exaggerated.
It’s just like a river, getting pushed along by an enormous force. If it feels very weak, it’s not because the force behind it is getting weaker, but because there’s not enough water. That’s what ancient people mean when they say that the left hand represented blood.
And the right side is usually a little farther away from the heart. It’s not experiencing the direct power of the heart. So it’s better at detecting problems with the energy. Without the advantage of distance, if your pulse is weak, it means there’s not enough power in your heart and muscles. It’s what Chinese Medicine calls a lack of chi.
If you split people down the middle with a line, the left side has the main artery going directly to the heart. The right side has the main vein running alongside it.
There’s a lot of people in hospitals who have no problems on the left side, but do have problems on the right side. Does that not have anything to do with these enormous blood vessels? Years later, I read books by Hu Xishu [famous Chinese Medicine doctor], and he thought the exact same thing I did. That the fundamental reason the left represents blood and the right represents chi is because the heart is on the left.
After I saw the explosive power of the heart, I suddenly realised that the most important thing for a pulse is to be soft and flexible.
The heart is delivering out a lot of power. If the blood vessels aren’t flexible, then that would be fatal. It would cause blood vessels to burst. So ancient people always say that a pulse has to be smooth and flat. Basically, it has to be soft.
After I understood all of this, I slowly grasped how to go about taking a pulse. I realised that the reason I have a strong pulse in my left hand because my liver and gallbladder have too much chi, it has too much accumulation. And my right hand is weak because my spleen and stomach is too weak. The weakness of my spleen and my stomach has caused the accumulation in my liver and gallbladder. So of course I would end up with a fatty liver, because they can’t get metabolised by the liver.
So you can only see through the body once you’ve grasped the pulse.
That made me even more motivated to study the pulse, because I want to figure out more stuff. Like what kind of people are prone to dying suddenly? What kind of people are prone to getting tumours? What kind of people have too much water?
All of this is science. Taking a pulse isn’t anything magical at all.
It’s actually very simple.”
Comments say, “Your pulse in your left and right hand always represented different spots. I don’t understand why it took you so long to get this common sense.”
“I’ve seen a Chinese Medicine doctor who was pretty young, and yet he could diagnose me with with blood backflow in my mitral valve, and my mitral tricuspid valve isn’t closed all the way, and told me to get a CT scan.”
“The main reason there’s not enough scientific explanation behind what Chinese Medicine doctors do is just because very few people in the industry actually bother to study it on a scientific level.”
I'm not a doctor, but in general don't healthier people have lower pulses?