Chinese sayings: 39 (以毒攻毒 yǐ dú gōng dú)

 

以毒攻毒

yǐ dú gōng dú

"by-means-of poison attack poison"

The English equivalents are:  fight fire with fire; fight evil with evil; set a thief to catch a thief.

(from googling) Quote Vaccines work by introducing a weakened or inactive version of a germ to your body, triggering a safe immune response without causing the disease. This "imitated" infection teaches your immune system to recognize and remember the specific pathogen, creating antibodies and memory cells. If you encounter the real germ later, your immune system is prepared to fight it off effectively, providing protection from serious illness. Unquote

    One of the rules in my house when I was growing up was to go and clean out the mouth immediately after getting up, before doing anything else.  Even taking a phone call that had got you out of bed would earn you a ticking off, even though the other party can't smell your unclean breath.

    Eyebrows were raised, therefore, when we were told about the recommendation by a TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) practitioner whom our circles had heard about, mainly because he was a bit young (in his 40s?) to be a TCM practitioner.  (The traditional image, in my childhood days anyway, was that of an old man [note: man] with a grey beard.  That's how long it's supposed to take to learn before one is good enough to start treating people.)

    This new buzz of a TCM practitioner had recommended that instead of brushing out all the foul-smelling stuff in our mouths accumulated over our x hours of sleep, we should first of all, upon getting up, drink some water.  (In the Chinese tradition, preferably warm water, in spite of the hot tropical climate, because it's closer to the temperature of the body and therefore won't be such a shock to the system and upset various organs in their functioning.)  

    The idea is similar to the general principle of how vaccines work (injecting them into our body which makes the body produce antibodies to fight the disease), which has been around for a long time and accepted by most people.  (I know a couple of women who feel quite strongly about the Covid vaccine, regularly forwarding anti-Covid vaccine material around in support of their feelings about it.)  

    As I understood it at the time (I was ten), this TCM practitioner was saying, back then in the 1960s, that the process of feeding the body with the foul-smelling stuff in our mouths first thing in the morning would trigger a reaction in the body to fight it.  (It makes sense, although to me as a ten-year-old child, it's a bit worrying that we carry this supposedly harmful stuff in our mouths all the time, living with it at first hand.)

(Singapore, 1960s)