Traditional Chinese medicine treatment by grandma leaves baby girl in hospital with serious injuries to her face
- TCM is often used by the elderly and in rural parts of China in the belief it can cure a wide range of ailments
- Last month, an elderly woman put oil extracted from a cooked mouse on her grandson to treat a burn, he developed an infection and ended up in intensive care
The baby girl’s forehead festered and she was sent to Hunan Children’s Hospital in Changsha, capital of Hunan, central China, after her grandma applied a TCM treatment called gua sha to the child’s face, news website rednet.cn reported.
With over 2,000 years history in China, gua sha is a practice in which people use a tool, such as a comb, spoon or a coin, to scrape a patient’s skin to produce light petechiae; tiny red, flat spots on the skin caused by bleeding underneath. This scraping method is supposed to move energy, improve circulation and pass out toxins. After this treatment, the patient’s skin usually will have red or purple bruises, an indicator of the practice’s effectiveness. Normally the bruises will disappear within several days.
If a person does not develop such bruises after gua sha, TCM theory claims it is probably because the patient is weak and their blood is flowing slowly in their body, or has a weakened immune system, or is overweight.
Gua sha is mainly adopted to cure minor conditions like colds, fevers, heatstroke and diarrhoea. Many people also practise it at home believing it will enhance their health.
The grandma used a silver ring smeared with egg white to scrape the baby girl’s forehead, hoping to cure her cough. Previously, the girl had been in hospital for nine days. But soon after being discharged from the hospital, she developed a fever that would not go down, according to the girl’s mother, the report said.
“My mother said ‘let’s try this indigenous method gua sha’,” the girl’s mother said. “But she scraped too heavily and my daughter’s skin was broken.”
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The girl’s mother then took her back to the hospital.
“When the girl was sent here, her forehead was covered in rashes that were obviously caused by scratches. Some parts of the skin had festered and some parts leaked pus,” said a doctor from the hospital.
The report on the incident has been viewed 300 million times on Weibo this week, with many people expressing sympathy for the infant.
“It should be done by professional TCM doctors. From my experience and commonsense, gua sha should not be used on such a young a child,” wrote one internet user.
Some internet users also recalled having received various unorthodox treatments from their parents who believed in folk remedies when they were children.
Last month, an elderly woman in Hunan province applied oil extracted from a cooked mouse on her grandson to treat a burn injury. The boy developed a serious infection and was admitted to the intensive care unit of a nearby hospital.
