Video of a year-younger Julian cringing and trying not to cry as a brusque Chinese doctor scraped the first layer of skin off his back somehow made me curious rather than terrified, and a couple days ago, in Chengdu, I tried the same traditional medicine treatment - guasha and huogua coupled with massage. (Guasha=scraping, huogua=cupping. They scrape your skin to get the toxins to rise to the surface, then massage the area, then heat the inside of a glass cup and use it to kind of suction your skin. Normally you can tell on the street who has recently been cupped because they have a checkerboard pattern of purple circles down their backs.)

Julian maintains they went easy on me, but then, he would maintain that. I actually didn't find it painful; I found it really therapeutic and relaxing, as it felt like a backscratch and a massage at the same time. I kept waiting for the pain that the video depicted and it never came. When I looked at the pictures of my purple and red back skin afterwards, I was very surprised. I was even more surprised when my back muscles actually, lastingly, felt relieved.

The doctor also told me the second he saw me lie down ("you don't lay down flat enough!") that I had a strange curve in my upper spine ("your back is like a child's!") that I couldn't treat or fix by simply correcting my posture (so THERE, well-meaning strangers everywhere who think it's appropriate to tell me I should 'stand up straight').