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HE AL TH
Jakarta Expat 12-25 October 2011
Indonesia’s Largest Expatriate Readership | 54th Edition | 12 Oct – 25 Oct 2011 |
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Health Remedies By Graham Strauss
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s the dry season turns wet and the rains come knocking on our doors (and, in my case at least, dripping through our ceilings and onto our computers) it’s time for me to enjoy a bout of flu and to create a mini-Mount Merapi of used tissues next to my sickbed. Eventually, it came time for me to head off to the chemists for a big bag of pharmaceutical sweeties. I then headed back home clutching around five different remedies in my hand and found myself reflecting on how much I had gone local, vis-à-vis my propensity for chomping on pills as I would on a bag of M&Ms. Most Indonesians seem to need little encouragement to neck pills and potions by the bucketful, and not only chemists, but also supermarkets, convenience stores and even a roadside warungs are packed with tablets which are all guaranteed to cure you of common ailments such as flu, muscle pain, headaches, Batavia belly, cancer, spina bifida and the like.
Photo by mie cornoedus
There are also plenty of remedies out there to ease the symptoms of those Indonesian sicknesses that don’t precisely match up with strict biological and physiological categories. I’m referring here to those two stalking horses of the Apocalypse, masuk angin (enter wind) and panas dalam (hot inside). What these two ailments actually match up with in precise medical terms has always eluded me, however these two conditions between seem to cover pretty much all bases, from mild indigestion to haemorrhagic Ebola fever. Moreover, I’ve learnt through bitter experience that wind is far more likely to exit my body than it is to enter it.
Photo by Hanneke Mennens.
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