As he navigates behind the counter at Kamwo Herb and Tea Co., a bustling Chinese pharmacy on Grand Street in Chinatown, Tom Leung always weighs the freak-out factor. "Here's something that will definitely freak you out," he said as he nimbly assembled a prescription for an arthritic woman who was not well acquainted with traditional Chinese medicine. "Cicadas."
No debating that. The formula mandated a dosage of the shells of expired flylike serenading insects.Usually, the prescription is bundled loosely for the patient to boil as tea and then strain. But Leung funneled these ingredients straight into a mammoth tea bag. "This is for a non-Chinese customer, and she might not be real happy about seeing a cicada going into her tea," he said. "My theory is you make people as comfortable as possible."
So goes his weekday world, as Leung works as a Chinese-style pharmacist sorting through drawers of dried sea horses, magnolia flowers, deer antler and licorice root, dispensing prescriptions from herbalists and acupuncturists.
Then there is the western Tom Leung. On sporadic weekends, he fills prescriptions behind another counter. This one is at the pharmacy at either the Kmart at Pennsylvania Station or the Kmart at Astor Place, where he apportions pills into small bottles and keeps mum about the benefits of cicadas for the joints.
At a time when alternative medicine is increasingly intersecting with conventional medicine, Leung's professional bifurcation is perhaps an inevitable byproduct. In medicinal outlook, he is part Eastern, part Western, the ultimate hybrid pharmacist. It can make for complicated weeks.
Someone will stop in at Kmart with a headache associated with dizziness and Leung points them to Tylenol or Motrin. If the same person visits Kamwo, Leung feels it his duty to suggest some chuan xiong and bai zhi, which happen to be roots. Such is pharmaceutical life when East meets West in the same body and neither yields.
"A customer came into Kmart last week and said he had trouble sleeping and relaxing," said Leung, a chipper, companionable man of 28. "Knowing the side effects of sleeping pills, I didn't want to just tell them to take Sominex or something. As a Kmart employee that day, I couldn't say, go buy these herbs. So I told the person less coffee in the afternoon and don't eat after 9 p.m."
Chinese medicine makes use of often disagreeable-tasting brews of herbs, grasses, bark, branches, chemicals and animal parts in a tradition that traces back thousands of years. By and large, prescriptions are boiled into a tea or soup and drunk. At Kamwo, a pharmacist wraps the herbs in a square piece of paper. They look like salad preparations, the beginnings of a bird's nest, something the cat dragged in.
Western medicine, of course, is pretty much all pills and liquids.
Like an expanding number of his customers, Leung believes in both herb and pill. He does not see a clash between Chinese and Western medicine, and thus he keeps a mortar and pestle in both worlds. When he has a minor ailment, he visits an acu-punc-tur-ist or herbalist; for acute problems, he sees a Western doctor.
"In the past, it has been, you either believe in Chinese medicine or you believe in Western medicine," he said. "In the last five years, I see more of, `I'll take the best of both worlds.' Personally, I'm right in the middle. I tell people, if I have a headache, I'll take Tylenol. But if I have a persistent sore throat, I'll take herbs."