Geumsan Insam (ginseng) Festival
One festival that wasn't canceled was the festival celebrating insam (which the Western world knows as ginseng) in a small city near Daejeon. The festival was surprisingly interesting. Geumsan is a fairly small agricultural town, though it was all decked out for the festival:
The town had an agricultural market with some very fresh food:
They had strangely shaped roots, mushrooms, and even lizards floating in decorative jars, which made all the shops look like wizard laboratories:
(even this table was made from bottled ginseng. )
(Here the roots are tied together to form star patterns.)
They also had entire warehouses full of ginseng sans decorative jar, which is amazing since the lower quality ginseng is grown for five years and the good stuff is in the ground for seven.
Other strange things for sale included the velvet from deer antlers...
...dried silk worms...
...and (I shit you not) live bees sold in bags (?!?!) with small honey combs.
There were ginseng statues, ginseng aroma rooms, ginseng (and other) scarecrows... you get the idea:
We ate deep fried ginseng, ginseng icecream, and ginseng infused Korean pancakes, all of which were pretty good.
The samples of ginseng tea on the other hand... well, ginseng doesn't actually taste very good, especially when concentrated. Just about every other Korean food there is (including silk worm larvae and chicken feet, both of which I declined to try on the basis of their smell) was available with a nice helping of ginseng tossed into the pot.
I don't think there was ginseng on the roast pig, but I 'm sure it could have been arranged:
There were also some events with no obvious connection to the wonder plant, such as a synchronized dance competition to Korean pop songs and a calligraphy stand. As Westerners we were given a free* sheet of calligraphy stating the wish that Alanna and I remain happy together. (*The price was that we were interviewed and had our picture taken and will probably be on the brochures and website for next year's festival. Every festival likes to have pictures of the token white person enjoying the event.)
One of the more fascinating parts of the festival were those having to do with health. Keep in mind that the festival took place in the middle of the swine flu panic, so there were handwash stations everywhere, and the aroma room had a 'fever detector' that looked like a metal detector but claimed to be able to remotely take out temperatures as we walked through it. Thus people were even more desperate than usual to believe nonsense like booths that claimed to predict a lot about your health on the basis of what basically amounted to palm readings:
The ginseng museum also talked quite a bit about health. It had posters that made claims that ginseng helps in pretty much any aspect in health, from its famed roll as a male enhancement drug to claims that it prevents the common cold, provides more energy, and stops cell degeneration so that people live longer. My favorite claim (and seriously, this was in writing in the bloody museum, the only really official looking part of the festival, and purporting to be backed up by 'scientific studies') was that it "has been proven to delete the AIDS gene." Yes, that's right, not only is Western medicine ignoring the prefect and easy cure for AIDS, it is completely wrong about what it is; you see AIDS is a genetic disease not a syndrome caused by a virus. A former co-worker of mine also was told by a Korean doctor that kimchi keeps AIDS out of Korea. I have always been very skeptical of Eastern medicine since it is completely unproven to be anything but placebo, and even if a particular treatment or drug does work no one has the slightest idea as to why it works or how it would interact with other medicines. However, after this my deep skepticism has turned to pure ridicule. [Update: for a more serious and nuanced discussion of traditional medicine see the comments.] Anyway, besides misinformation, the museum had some impressive roots:
(This one isn't ginseng. I don't know what it is other than large.)
(These are preserved ginseng stems, leaves, and berries.)
Gingseng roots are said to look like people, and the museum had a collection of many where the resemblance was indeed plausible with amusing names:
(The Lovers)
(slim super model)
(Super Fighter)
(Ballerina)
The museum was much more believably informative about the practices of growing ginseng and the rituals that surround its farming:
(These cases remind me of the growing fetus display at OMSI)The festival was enjoyable overall:
11 comments:
awesome. i love the anthropomorphized ginseng cartoon people.
as far as bees, my guess is they're for people who want to get their gardens pollinated and are worried about the pollinator insects already in their neighborhood not being up to the job. so you bring in some live bees at the right time (but it's winter, so maybe my hypothesis is shot) and set them loose in your garden... sort of an compromise between having your own hive (with a queen and everything) and letting your regular neighborhood insects do it.
It's questionable at best to treat a poorly-translated, overblown claim made by a museum at a ginseng festival and a secondhand report of what some Korean doctor told another foreigner as reasons to write off all of oriental medicine as something subject to pure ridicule. And to say that nobody has the slightest idea of how it works is an insult to the constantly re-evaluated and modified tradition of Traditional Chinese Medicine that began with the compilation of the Nei Jing between 100 and 300 BCE. Don't you think Chinese Medicine doctors learned anything in school, or have any basis in theory or clinical experience for their diagnoses?
Western and Traditional Chinese medicine are two completely different systems of thought that diverge in the most basic concepts, including the perception of health and the human body as well as philosophical underpinnings. The law of non-contradiction is foreign to them, for godsakes. How they think of causality is different, their methods of proof and criteria of truth are different, and we know about it only in translation with the only most superficial new-agey knock-offs of Chinese medicine being our most prominent examples in America. I've also seen it ridiculed on TV on a show like House. I'm not sure what kind of proof you are looking for that acupuncture or Chinese herbs have more than a placebo effect, but I'm assuming it'd have to be from a western-scientific perspective, and there is actually quite a bit of literature evaluating traditional medicines and practices from a western point of view, doing things like analyzing the make-up of certain herbs and testing their effects on certain strains of bacteria or conducting clinical studies in which patients are first evaluated by western physicians, then treated with TCM, then re-evaluated by the western physician to judge the treatments effectiveness. Some of these studies have resulted in the production of western pharmaceuticals that isolate what seems to be the active ingredient in Chinese herbs, and many come up with modern scientific explanations of how Chinese medicine might work. But this misses the point of a system of medicine that is holistic and preventative. TCM does not recognize diseases as separate entities from the patient that 'cause' the illness and its symptoms and thus needs to be isolated and eliminated. It instead treats 'patterns of disharmony' that cannot be separated from its manifestation in a particular person. Though Chinese medicine is personalized and holistic and less objective and analytical compared to modern western medicine, that doesn't make it less rational or empirical; it's just that the concepts used to perceive clinical situations are totally different.
I personally haven't had any life-changing experience with acupuncture or herbal medicine. I've had both, but never needed it for any real health problems that it would either fix or not fix. But I've talked to plenty of people who have had experiences with it that it'd be hard to explain away with the placebo effect. It's certainly no replacement for Western medicine, but it also has enough validity to stand without it. And both systems have blind spots, things they can't treat, that they other system can.
Eliot, I will admit that I wrote such strong statements to bait you, and your response did not disappoint since I was hoping you would give a defense of Eastern medicine.
Here's what I really think:
Western medicine has at least one major lesson to learn from Eastern medicine, which is the importance of preventative care. The US health system wouldn't be so screwed up if it wasn't completely set up for dealing with things after they become emergencies.
I remain skeptical of acupuncture. However, I expect that most traditional medicines are effective, but also that the doctors prescribing them don't know what is the active ingredient and what is superfluous or perhaps just there to make it more palatable. When I say no one knows how they work I mean no one knows an explanation that would satisfy me since the explanation would be given in another framework that I do not operate in.
I did see an article about how China is pushing to analyze traditional medicine in a Western manner so that it can be exported to Western countries and can pass FDA standards in the US or equivalent regulations in other countries. I didn't see anything about the results of that effort, but it looks like you did and that a lot of those studies have lead to advances in Western medicine.
I agree with your point that the most superficial new age-y parts of traditional medicine are the parts best known in the US. I expect that the sign in the museum is a result of the same cause as many of the oddities in Korea, its sudden industrialization. Since Korea went from one of the poorest nations in the world to one of the most advanced in under forty years there are of course a lot of ways that the culture has not yet adapted to the complete change that overtook the country. I would bet that the museum sign was part of an effort to suddenly try to justify traditional medicine from a Western perspective without taking the time to actually do what is required to make that justification (I mean the museum didn't take the time. There are probably scientists out there doing it, but they won't come to the absurd claims that the museum did). They used Western medical language, but whoever wrote that sign probably just did it to sound persuasive and was thinking about it from an Eastern perspective. We both know how well it works to try to, say, talk about free will in terms of physics while still thinking in an intentionality perspective.
Anyway, I hope you weren't offended. I know I often overstate things and then back off my far too strong claim, but this time it was actually on purpose since I knew that you would give a more impassioned and thorough response to my reactionary statements in the original post than you would have to my more reasonable and hedged actual position.
In general, I consider myself pessimistic when it comes to Eastern medicine. I don't think I'd ever consider acupuncture, and would probably only take herbs if they were low-cost.
That said, I think people too often debate the effectiveness of Eastern medicine without debating the effectiveness of Western treatments (I'll get to preventative medicine in a bit). Many drugs and other treatments do have a physical effect and improve people's health (i.e. removing an infected appendix).
However, there are many treatments prescribed in the West that have an effect no greater than a placebo's. On the other hand, I don't think that this is such a bad thing. Wired ran this article, which catalogs how the placebo effect is becoming much stronger. Drugs that used to beat the placebo now don't. So even if its true that Eastern medicine doesn't beat the placebo, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Placebos can be really effective!
When it comes to preventative medicine, I agree that there should be more of an emphasis on this in the United States. However, I think one of the reasons that Americans haven't been doing a good job with this is because we're trying to distribute preventative "medicine" through standard medicine-related areas - hospitals, doctor's office, etc. But some of the best things we could do to promote better health have nothing to do, at least on the surface, with health. Repealing farm subsidies, increasing taxes on alcohol, reducing speed limites, or providing free and nutritious lunches at school, would probably do more for the health of Americans than any medicine-based preventative treatment in either Eastern or Western medicine. But these are all policy decisions, not personal action.
Baited me, eh? Damn you, you clever bastard!
Landon, you can't redefine 'nobody knows how it works' to 'nobody can give me an explanation using a system of ideas completely foreign and ill-fitted to it' and still use it as a reason to discredit it. Just saying. Also, requiring practitioners to know and isolate the 'active ingredient' in their medicine already betrays a western mode of thinking in my mind; such a way of thinking always runs the risk of oversimplifying the matter. I also caution against reducing the eastern/western medicine distinction to preventative/reactive. After all, people in the east still came to their doctors after they were hurt or felt sick and expected them to make them feel better.
I suspect the main reason that I'm more open to oriental medicine than either of you is stems from my direct experience of one of its central concepts, chi/qi, through my practice of tai chi and qi gong. I've felt chi quite tangibly between my palms after practicing the qi gong I learned in a Roseburg community education class - so much so that it really weirded me out. Also, my experience with tai chi is the main reason I became interested in oriental medicine in the first place. I wanted to find out more about that kind of bodywork and found out it is a piece of the philosophy behind oriental medicine as a whole. Though I am not yet prepared to whole-heartedly endorse all of what passes for traditional chinese medicine as a whole, I do know that practicing tai chi makes me feel really healthful and happy and good and it has done so many times.
My mother's sister's husband's brother is a herbalist, and he is of the opinion that the less medicine you take, the better, and to the detriment of his business he often sends people home with free advice and no herbs, and generally speaking, I agree with him. Acupuncture, though, seems pretty harmless to me; I wouldn't mind having it done regularly simply for relaxation's sake, just like getting massages. But I'm sure the same is not true for those of us who are freaked out by needles. I don't think this is a rational fear in the case of acupuncture, but it definitely takes away from its appeal and probably its effectiveness as well, given the anxiety and stress it would cause.
Mark, as always, you have very sensible ideas of how to get things done, though I admit the speed limits one went over my head. I don't see what effect that would have on health generally unless it's just by reducing the number of car accidents. Strange about the effectiveness of placebos, too; I guess the mere expectation of recovery is pretty powerful in itself. That might go to show how much health is mental and psychological as well as physical; one thing that interests me about oriental medicine is that it never seperates the two.
Anyway, I'm glad to talk/debate this out. It helps me clear my own thoughts as I think about what to do with my life in the relatively near future, with applying for oriental medicine school as one option on the table. Another is law, which could potentially put me in a position to effect the kind of changes Mark is talking about and would also be less of a time commitment and would also put me in a better place financially.
1) The speed limit thing is about reducing the number of car accidents. After driving intoxicated, I think the #1 reason for accidents is speeding (and I think many of those drunk people are speeding as well, though I'm not sure how much lowering the speed limit would effect their behavior). Another idea I've read is to get rid of the center line on more minor roads. The line apparently encourages people to go faster. I noticed this in Japan - most non-main roads (and even some main ones) would have traffic going both ways and people walking on both sides of the street, but would barely be wide enough for two cars and no lines.
2) I think that the only way Landon can possibly understand what Eliot is talking about is if Landon changes 'nobody knows how it works' to 'nobody can give me an explanation using my system of ideas', even if it happens to be 'completely foreign and ill-fitted to it' (Landon, correct me if you think I'm wrong about this.) And it might be possible that we're at an impasse that can't be bridged. It really does seem to me that you two are bumping up against the "science" and "religion" divide.
Mark, I don't get your #2 point. The way I understood it was that 'nobody knows how it works' was part of Landon's overstatement to bait me. Then he backed off to 'no one can explain it to me in my system of ideas.' That coheres with the main gist of my response, which is that OM (and the explanation of 'how it works') relies on a different set of ideas and way of thinking than we're used to. I just pointed out that if Landon backs up to where he did, he can no longer use it as a reason against the credibility OM because all it's saying is that (for understandable reasons) it doesn't make sense to him. It's as if someone said that Russian is total gibberish and used that to argue that it is an ineffective, irrational language but then backed up to simply saying 'I don't understand Russian.'
A friend of mine posted a link to this documentary on my facebook page. It's a little dated (2003) but I learned some from it. I didn't realize the extent to which there has already been debate about alternative medicine in general. Based on what I saw in this documentary I'd also be super skeptical about alternative medicine, even though I think they did a decent job of being balanced in it. I also know nothing about 'mind-body work', dietary herbal supplements, controversial cancer treatments, homeopathy, chanting & painful massage to enhance fertility, or any of the other things they grouped acupuncture and oriental medicine with under the heading of Complementary and Alternative Medicine. It makes it easier to understand the resistance to oriental medicine. Here's the link to the PBS documentary:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/altmed/
First, Eliot, I'm not reducing the Eastern/Western medicine difference into preventative/reactive at all. I think what Western medicine (and much more so policy) needs to learn from Eastern medicine is to do both. I don't even think that having preventative and reactive care is the core of traditional medicine, but it is one part that I will say without qualification that Western medicine should adopt. The lack of a mind/body split also seems like a good idea, though I think a lot of psychobiologists would claim that at least part of Western medicine is already there (if only by collapsing it all into the physical, which as good anomalous monists we don't agree with...)
As I said, I am skeptical about the rest of it. I think the analogy you are drawing between frameworks and language is not very apt in this case. A better language analogy would be Entish (from Tolkien's LOTR). It is not possible to speak remotely quickly in Entish. Short conversations take days. Citing the fact that it is a slow language is a valid critique for anyone who values brevity. Ents value taking their time, so given their value system there is no flaw in their language. I would argue that traditional medicine is unscientific (in the Western understanding of science), and so if you value (Western) science (and I usually do) then that is a valid argument against it. Those who do not value science need not be concerned. However, I expect that most of the people in my community that I would be having this discussion with do value science to at least a moderate degree. Thus OM's credibility is hurt given certain values. I could not be reasonably expected to begin to discredit any idea for all value systems.
Hi there! I've got a question, how does the ginseng in a jar cost?
Hi Marta,
I honestly don't remember how much the ginseng in jars cost, other than they cost far more than I was willing to spend. I think they were at least 100 Euros for the biggest and nicest ones, but that is merely my best guess four years later. I wish you well finding one at a reasonable price.
Thank you so much! I'm not going to buy one. I'm writing my bachelor's thesis about ginseng and it's hard as hell to fing that info. Thanks anyway, and keep on doing what you do. Great job! :)
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