After 8 weeks with a deep dry cough that made me and everyone around me miserable I decided to go to the Xinzheng city hospital. I thought it would be wise to get a chest x-ray to see if something was really wrong. Since my spoken Mandarin is only a few words I took a student friend as a translator along with me, He was great!
We arrived at the hospital and checked in at the front desk. Since I had no previous visits at the hospital, my translator just told them my unofficial Chinese name: Gao Fei. Now I am Gao Fei at the Xinzheng hospital! They didn't ask for any other info so that was all they knew about me. But they don't seem to keep records on patients. I was given all my paperwork and x-rays when I left, so it is up to me to keep my medical records. The cost of registration and my doctor consultations was 6 yuan (about 90 cents).
The staff member sent us on down the hall to a consultation room labeled "Breathing". We knocked. There was another patient inside talking to the doctor so we went in and waited our turn. My translator explained my complaints and the doctor asked a couple of questions then wrote the order for the chest x-ray.
In Chinese hospitals you pay in cash in advance. So we stopped at the cashier window and paid 70 yuan (about $11). Then we walked back to the x-ray department. We gave the doctor's order to a technician who told us that I was to have two x-rays, so we walked back to the cashiers window and paid another 70 yuan. Then we returned to the X-ray department and sat down to wait for them to call "Gao Fei". In less than 5 minutes I was standing in the x-ray room in front of the machine. My translator stood beside me the whole time (at least they shut the door to the hall!). They took a front view and a side view. Then they told us to return in 45 minutes.
This whole process has taken about 40 minutes. My translator and I left the hospital and took a walk in "two head" park (nicknamed by the foreigners for the two giant busts of the ancient emperor and his brother who were born in Xinzheng-- or so the legend goes.) Then we stopped and bought ice cream sundaes at a Chinese fast food place. My translator warned me that according to his mother eating something cold was bad for a cough (it seems all Chinese believe that the secret to good health is the temperature of your food or drink, and that cold is almost always bad. This relates to the belief in yin-yang. Cold is yin.)
After our wait time was up we returned and claimed my two x-rays from the x-ray department and walked back to the doctor's office. We again waited our turn and then she examined the x-rays and declared them clear. There was a little phlegm at the bottom of one lung but nothing serious.
Next the doctor wrote an order for a blood test to see if I had an infection. So back to the cashier's window to pay 20 yuan (about $3) and then up a flight of stairs to the laboratory. We went into a hall-like room adjacent to the laboratory. There was a wall of windows that looked into the actual laboratory. I sat in front of one of three openings in this wall and set my arm on the window sill. Another patient sat at another opening also having blood drawn. A technician looked at the doctor's order then proceeded to poke my elbow and withdraw a vial full of blood. We were told to wait 5 minutes. They put my blood into some kind of machine and a few minutes later handed us a print out of the results. Then we walked back to the "breathing" room and waited our turn to talk to the doctor for the third time. She looked at the results and declared them normal-- no infection (hooray-- I was dreading the prescription for antibiotics which is the cure-all for most sicknesses in China.) So the good news was, I was basically healthy. I just had (still have) a persistent cough.
The doctor wrote a prescription for some cough medicine. Then she thought to ask if I had diabetes. When I said that I did she changed the prescription to a low sugar form of the cough medicine. My translator and I went to the pharmacy, got a bill for the medicine, went back to the cashier to pay for it (10 yuan-- about $1.50) and then returned and got the pills.
We were done. It had taken about 2 1/2 hours and only cost about $26! I walked out with a bag containing 2 x-rays, a print out of my labwork, a bunch of receipts, and a packet of 9 pills. (The pills helped me cough up some phlegm but were no cure for my cough. So far, nothing has been a cure.)
In the States such a series of procedures might have taken several days and cost hundreds of dollars. How can the Chinese system be so efficient and so cheap? My translator and I talked a lot about the differences in our two medical systems. In China you keep your own records and you pay as you go. The hospital needs no expensive record keeping or billing departments. In China you do not have a personal physician. You take the one that is on duty. The doctor and the technicians and other staff are paid well by local standards, but do not get rich from their practice. The whole system is subsidized by the Chinese government to keep costs down.
I do not know how thoroughly the Chinese doctors are trained in western medicine. They know more about traditional Chinese medicine which uses herb based pharmaceuticals, folk medicine and friendly advice about healthy living. Some clinics practice acupuncture or massage therapy. Traditional Chinese medicine emphasizes low tech, low impact treatments. Probably it is effective for many common ailments, but may not be able to handle serious diseases (western medicine can't handle many of them as well).
If someone gets seriously ill they can go to a big city clinic where a western trained specialist will charge higher prices (still less than in the USA!) for
treatments based on harsh chemicals and expensive technology. As for me, my one experience in the Xinzheng hospital was positive and gave me the information I needed to deal with my minor ailment. If I had spent ten to twenty times as much at an American hospital, I suspect the results would have been the same.
