Shanghai Daily Wednesday 1 April 2009

EXPAT TALES C5 www.shanghaidaily.com/feature

Editor’s Note:

This weekly series focuses on individuals who have lived in China for a while and have a tale that’s worth telling. Age, gender, nationality and race, all are unimportant in comparison with what adventures the subject has been up to, the experiences they can recount. Get in touch with a tip about a China story that deserves to be told. (features@shanghaidaily.com)

Doris RathbergerNationality: German

Age:43

Profession: TCM doctor

Q&A

Description of self:Compassionate fire horse

Favorite place: My garden with my family and pets (four cats and two dogs, and she describes her home as the “zoo”).

Strangest sight: It has to be those bikes that are stacked high with all kinds of stuff and people on the streets in their pajamas.

Worse experience: I saw a young couple who were hit by a car. One died, the other was severely injured.

Motto for life: Enjoy every day.

How to improve Shanghai:Improve traffic regulations for bicycles, scooters and pedestrians.

Advice to newcomers: Don’t get involved in too many activities right away. Breathe deeply, take a step and look around from your own cultural perspective and then jump right in.

It took a move to China and seven years of arduous study for German Doris Rathgeber to achieve her childhood

dream of becoming a doctor.However, she isn’t hanging out

her shingle in Western medicine but in the ancient arts of traditional Chinese medicine, including acu-puncture and herbal medicine.

“I always wanted to be a doctor, and from a very young age I could remember the various diseases friends and family had,” she says.

Rathgeber, who came to Shang-hai 13 years ago as a so-called “trailing spouse,” is now owner of the medical clinics Body & Soul with practices in Minhang and Huangpu districts.

Founded in 2004, Body & Soul offers integrated Western and Chinese medical treatments in a range of fields, such as internal medicine, gynecology, pediatrics and dermatology.

She was overwhelmed by her first year in China, but she later learned to speak, read and write Chinese and delved deeply into China’s medical traditions. Rathge-ber completed a five-year degree at Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine.

“In the first year here, I was completely depressed, I was completely out of myself, I wasn’t normal,” she says. “I had culture shock, I couldn’t imagine living here in China and I asked my husband for a divorce.”

In her practice, she sees expats who turn to TCM and counseling to help them deal with the difficul-ties of adjusting to a new life in China.

It takes times, she says, for China to reveal its hidden beauty.

“I just got used to it — China, I think, is not a place you fall in love with at first sight,” says Rathgeber.

“You can’t fall in love with it by just seeing it because what you read about China is completely

Fire horse fuses Chinese, Western healing

Understanding both TCM and Western medicine, German Doris Rathgeber knows her yin and yang and hangs out her shingle in integrated medicine, reports Sam Riley

different from what you see here,” she says. “When you get used to it, then you dig deeper. But most people come and go and don’t get involved with what is actually going on here.”

When Rathgeber first arrived, she started helping her husband Ekkehard, who was working for giant media group Bertelsmann, because she wanted to “leave an empty house.” But it was his blunt advice that changed the path of her life.

“He said, ‘I don’t want you around. I need to set up this com-pany, so find your own thing, go study Chinese’,” she recalls.

Rathgeber spent two years learn-ing how to speak, read and write Chinese before undertaking her TCM studies. After graduation she spent two more years on practice. She read her pulse three times a day, closely monitoring both her physical health and her moods and emotions.

She practiced on family and friends to hone her diagnostic skills.

Now she heads two clinics that employ 40 people, including 15 doctors, and see 250 patients a month.

As a child growing up in Dussel-dorf, she had wanted to be a doctor.

But, describing herself as a poor student, Rathgeber instead went on to a career in IT sales before begin-ning her medical studies in China.

She says it took a long time to grasp TCM’s fundamental

foundations and philosophies, a process that was helped by deliver-ing talks to Shanghai’s expat community.

Through explaining TCM to a foreign audience and helping her expat patients, many of whom may be seeking TCM treatments for the

first time, Rathgeber says she has deepened her own understanding of the medical system.

She has made frequent appear-ances on Chinese television and has appeared on German television and radio.

Rathgeber says the optimal

treatment for a patient provides the best of both Western and Chinese medical systems.

In her medical studies, the Ger-man spent 60 percent of her course working on the basics of Western medicine, including microbiology, physics, pathology and anatomy.

“If you know both systems you can decide what is necessary, but it comes out of your own way of thinking,” she says.

“So you can switch between two completely different systems because we can never jeopardize the patient’s health because of our ideas. If you see serious signs of disease, you must take other mea-sures, so we know our borderlines very clearly as a TCM practitio-ner,” she says.

Doris Rathgeber treats patients in traditional Chinese medicine way at her clinic, Body & Soul.

A doctor at Doris Rathgeber’s clinic practices traditional

cupping on a patient.