First time I heard of a cultural panacea was in London during grad school, when one of my Greek friends told me that her family didn't have health insurance because her mother treated everything with olives: olive soap and olive oil. When her sister contracted an STD and the olive soap treatment didn't work, they consulted a biochemist uncle who 'prescribed' something beyond olives. Her mother's deeply ingrained belief in the healing power of olives struck me. What olives is to my Greek friend's mother, green tea is to the Chinese but maybe in a less orthodox way: green tea toothpaste, green tea extracts in shampoo and cosmetics, green tea everywhere in home remedies.

In Kunming, a girl in her early twenties who goes by the English name Nora shows me how she treats her pierced ears when they get irritated. After enjoying a cup of green tea, she selects two stems of tea leaves and dries them. Once they are dry and have hardened, she places them inside her pierced earlobes. “The green tea extracts from the leaves soothes the irritated skin. It also keeps the piercing from closing up, that's convenient.” These tea-leaf-stem earrings can be worn for months, “they are natural and healthy,” she explains.

This makes me wonder about other cultural panaceas: in Indochina it seems to be tiger balm, but when I lived in the UK, I remember paracetamol being the cure-it-all. My British friends seem to treat everything with it – from a hangover to the common cold. Paracetamol is incredibly cheap and readily available at drug stores such as Boots. When will an OTC (over the counter) drug take the place of tiger balm, green tea or olives?

We spent a couple of days in a remote village, climbing a close-by mountain. Eating with the entire family, we also meet the 78 year old grandmother. While she sleeps in her own house, she comes over to her third son and his wife for the meals and is particularly interested in meeting us foreigners. Later we learn, that we've been the first foreigners ever to visit their village. Everyone has seen foreigners on TV and was kind of joking whether we had just walked out of one of their TV sets right into a living room. So many conversations we had focused on how we got to their village from San Francisco.

The grandmother was quite a character. With 78, she was very hunched over but moving around nimbly as a cat. Later we learned that currently she was part of the road construction team, collecting large rocks and filling up the other people's baskets who'd then use the rocks to pave the road. Who would have thought! Asking her about her general wellbeing and health, I learn that she is particularly proud of her teeth. She's still got all of them and this is how she does it: every evening she brews a strong green tea and lets it cool off over night. In the morning she brushes her teeth with this dark liquid. Grandmother's only complaint is her lower back. Not surprising to us, as everyone is bent over the entire day: working on the field, keeping the fire going, doing the laundry squatting down and cooking over the fire.

For her lower back, the village medicine man has told her to brew a tea out of some plants and roots that she collects herself in the woods. Imagine a 78 year old in the US being told by their doctor to go into the nearby national park and collect medicinal plants instead of filling a prescription at CVS.

I feel very fortunate to have met Grandmother and to get her permission to share her story and pictures with you.

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