Chinese medicine

Here's a strange one. When I was sick last week, I asked the sweet lady who works in the lab if she had any suggestions on how to fight it. She's chinese, so I guess I had some vague notion that she had some ancient mystical cure for me. What she told me was too funny though. She said, "I have something, but it's for chinese people. I don't know how it would affect people from other races."

I replied, "What??"
She clarified by giving me an example of what the word race meant, "I don't know how it would affect Black guys, white guys... etc... It might kill you! How can I know?"

:-o

So I asked the next logical question. "What about Japanese people? Can they take the medicine?" She told me they could. "What about other asians? Koreans? Vietnamese people?"

She explained that she had no idea how the medicine worked. She just knows that if chinese people take it when their cold is just starting, it usually cures it. Fascinating. I had learned that the genetic differences between one race and another is less than 0.01% or something like that. Is that difference sufficient enough that we would all have different medicines?

I almost want to try the medicine just to see what would happen. Or maybe get a range of people of varying asianess to try it out. What if I gave it to Vrej, technically West Asian. How would it affect him? Maybe he would become Chinese. There was an episode of Star Trek where they tried to cure this guy of a disease using some kind of futuristic technique, and it began activating dormant genes in his genome. Naturally he began to de-evolve. What do I mean de-evolve? You know those diagrams where the monkey turns into a man? Well, this went in the opposite direction until the guy became a caveman then eventually a spider creature. Then other people caught the viruse, and they all de-evolved too until the whole ship was filled with cavemen and prehistoric acid spitting lizards things....

Yeah, I promise to cut down on the star trek references from now on. Unless I do end up taking the medicine and it does somehow transform me.