Dr. Richard Cyr over at the My Health Beijing blog has coined a new illness for foreigner living and working in China – expatitis - and I hope it catches on. The piece, and the second installment of the series, are both worth a read since they spell out just what one can expect when living life in the expat fast lane of cheap beer, cigarettes, and irregular sleep cycles.
Both pieces are products of a conversation that he, , James, and I had last month about using his comparative advantage as a Beijing doctor to bring us unique pieces. I am very happy that he took it to heart – and I couldn’t have hoped for him to write better articles. Below are two amusing excerpt’s from the first piece that introduce you to Expatitis and who is susceptible to it;
What is expatitis, you ask? Good question; you won’t find this on WebMD because I just made it up, to fit a syndrome of health problems I see in many expats. Here’s my definition:
Expatitis (Expat from expatriā “to leave native land” +itis “inflammation, abnormal states, excesses, tendencies, etc”) – a syndrome of multiple physical and mental illnesses brought on by conscious lifestyle decisions among expats.
Let’s look at the syndrome’s main features:
- Poor mental health (stress, insomnia, anxiety and depression)
- Exhaustion
- Too much alcohol use
- A lot of smoking
- Lack of exercise
- Risky sex
- Poor eating habits
Does this remind you of a friend, a loved one — or yourself?
To help illustrate the symptoms of this disease, Dr. Cyr has invented a patient prototype, Mr IndySpensible, who functions as a stand in for any and all varieties of illness-susceptible expat:
Let’s jump into Case One: Mr Indy Spensible, a mid-50’s General Manager of a large company, comes to my clinic with “funny chest pains” for a month. He’s a stocky guy with a big belly; very outgoing but obviously exhausted, wistfully eyeing his beeping Blackberry as we talk. He gets about 6 hours of sleep “if I’m lucky” and constantly travels. He has “no time” to exercise like he used to. He smokes and drinks “just enough to keep ahead” at his frequent business dinners. Lately he’s feeling “really stressed” and started having panic attacks after his second wife started threatening to move back to Europe “if I don’t slow down”. “You gotta help me, doc, I’m falling apart”…
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What ways does Expatitis manifest itself in your life?
This is a more serious problem, and I even have this problem on the large, new planes, not the old small ones that have pressurization problems.
Hey, the discovery of “expatitis” is eye-opening…but where is the cure?! Is that my brain got so infected that I can not find it? Please give more information about this!
interesting movie about expatitis, except in Bangladesh:
very similar themes as those in Beijing
[...] #4: There is no way that you can use this information to start your own sperm-bank or even to directly invest in one (even for those of you married with a Chinese woman whose “family is really well connected.” Sperm-donation is, however, an area ripe for modern marketing, since it is possible that 95% of donors in Chinese sperm banks are college students. So, you can probably get out to college campuses and market the heck out of a local sperm bank business willing to pay you a part of the cut. Is it likely to work, probably not. But if it does you could make some real mullah, since a donor gets Y3000 for giving his sperm. At a commission of 10%, multiplied by 100 college men, you could make enough money in 12 months to fund a further two years of lethargy and bar-fueled expatititis. [...]