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The Health and Well-Being of the Left-Behind Elderly in Rural China
Published in Goh Cheng Soon, Gerard Bodeker, Kishan Kariippanon, Healthy Ageing in Asia, 2022
The Essential Prescriptions for Every Emergency Worth a Thousand in Gold (Beiji qian jin yaofang, 備急千金要方), c. 652 CE, is illustrative for Physician-Scholar Sun Simiao's (孫思邈) seventh-century philosophy of Yangsheng (养生). “The ancients, in their knowledge of the Dao, followed the pattern of yin and yang, harmonised [their actions] with skills and calculations, were moderate in their food and drink and regular in their living habits, and did not recklessly overexert themselves. Therefore, they were able to keep their body and spirit complete and live out their heavenly years to the fullest, only leaving after a hundred years had passed” (quoted in Wilms, 2010). Yangsheng may be understood as a system of beliefs and practices designed for self-health cultivation, or what Lo (2001) calls “Techniques of nurturing life”, which are aimed at physical cultivation and longevity, dating to the Western Han period, and which in the present may broadly include such popular activities as taijiquan (太極拳) and qigong (氣功). These cultivation-of-longevity practices were originally performed in hopes of attaining one’s proper life expectancy, with the possession of their full vital forces (Engelhardt, 2000).
Yangsheng in the twenty-first century
Published in Vivienne Lo, Michael Stanley-Baker, Dolly Yang, Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine, 2022
So with its myriad faces, just what is yangsheng? Yangsheng is distinct from TCM in that while the latter, like all medical practice since medieval times, has been about the treatment of disease and physical or psychological dysfunction, the focus of yangsheng is on the maintenance and promotion of good health. In essence it seeks to produce a bodily equilibrium that obviates the need for medical intervention. The techniques of yangsheng involve what can be likened to a form of aspirational Epicureanism, a refining and attenuating of sensory experiences in the pursuit of different goals, in which nothing except excess is necessarily denied. Its key practices, from the very earliest recorded formulations in the Western Han dynasty, are based on meditation and breath control, callisthenic exercises, dietetics and sexology. This remains true to this day and even newly invented or appropriated practices can be judiciously fitted into this framework: it doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to connect choral singing with breath control. Practices like raising pet animals (birds, dogs etc.) literally ‘nurture life’. But they clearly relate to the equally antique practice of yangxin 养 心 ‘nurturing the heart’, the heart being more specifically a reference to the residence of the spirit rather than life in general.3 A key principle that links these practices of yangsheng and yangxin along with Epicureanism, is the need to avoid extremes of emotion; joy, anger, grief, laugher, etc., and extremes of desire, identified as the causes of disease in aristocratic people from ancient times (Lo 1998).
Hand carriage, antimicrobial resistance and molecular characterisation of methicillin-resistant coagulase-negative staphylococci isolated from gynaecological surgical staff
Published in Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, 2022
The research protocol and informed consent were approved by the Ethics committee of the Tianjin science and technology commission (approval No TMUaMEC2017017). The permission was acquired from gynaecological surgical staff before sample collection, and no hand cleaning was required before sampling. The samples were collected from both hands of staff in a gynaecological surgery centre in Tianjin during working hours without wearing gloves. The collection was single-time collected works, and the collection date was Nov 2018. The surgery centre contains 19 operating rooms and employs 108 staff. All samples were collected with sterilised dry cotton swabs (Yangzhou Yangsheng Medical Science and Technology Co., Ltd, China) and transferred back to the laboratory on the same day of sampling. All samples were plated and purified according to standard methods.