View from inside the IV room

In my three years in Beijing, I had sometimes heard stories that China's doctors have a direct and ubiquitous answer for helping patients who have something more than the common cold - insert a needle somewhere and pump medicine directly into their system with an intravenous (IV) drip.

The approach always struck me as a bit ghoulish, an inelegant thing to do to already weakened people, further brutalizing them in their time of need. I just want to take a couple of pills a day if need be, preferably with vaguely French-sounding names.

But I was recently hit so hard by something I was willing to go to any length to find relief. To my dismay the prescribed treatment was daily visits to the China-Japan Friendship Hospital for an IV drip.