Chinese medicine

Listening to the heart

We meet up with Ayin who will bring us to a traditional Mongolian doctor. We arrive in a neighborhood that looks rather poor. We push a door in front of which is written “traditional medicine.” There, the smell of plants has us dreaming and makes us want to go on. There, our five senses are in paradise: smell with the plants, hearing lulled by the sound of the man crushing plants with a large metal hammer and many other experiences that amaze our other senses. At his desk, there’s an old man of about 75 years with a very round head and slightly tanned. Seeing that we’ll film him, he has the reflex that the Mongolians have, that is to get dressed in traditional clothes. When he comes back, dad asks him to do as though he was a patient coming in for a consultation. He takes his pulse at the wrist and, after five minutes tells him: “ you had stomach problems”. That’s exactly where he was operated. Incredible! Then, dad asks about cholesterol and in the meantime, I film the preparation of his remedy. After that, I film a young man who is a little chubby and has the build of a wrestler crush with one hand large red plants reducing them to powder. This powder will then be put delicately in little bags. Then dad calls me. It’s my turn to have my pulse checked. The doctor presses on my wrist and searches but he doesn’t find the pulse so he digs his nails and his fingers in my wrist and tells me that actually I have lower-back problems, something everyone told me in Paris. We’re getting ready to leave when the doctor stops us to give us a book he wrote on Mongolian medicine.