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\tIn any traditional Chinese pharmacy, one of the first things to strike a foreigner is always the ingredients… Frankly, they’re a little strange: dried sea horses, geckos, snakes, worms, a stuffed deer and one lone owl gazing down from above.<\/p>\n
\tMeanwhile, they’re hovered over by serious pharmacists in lab coats, consulting giant medical tomes. It all seems rather incongruous. But this is not “Macbeth.” This is as much a part of China’s history as anything else.<\/p>\n
\tTake, for example, snakes. They’re used for “wind expulsion” and “channel clearance”—which means they’ll do wonders for sagging energy levels and weak immunity.<\/p>\n
\tBack in the Tang Dynasty (618-907), an unnamed villager suffered from a terrible skin disease. Boils and lesions covered his entire body. After drinking from a vat of wine over a period of time, his skin unexpectedly started to clear up. Everyone was shocked—no one could quite work out what had cured his ailments. That is, until a large, rotten snake was discovered lying at the bottom of the barrel. The snake, it was hypothesized, could cure skin diseases!<\/p>\n