Why the Chinese buy hundreds of kilograms of human nails (5 photos)

Put it in soup! It's a joke, but not really. The fact is that in traditional Chinese medicine, human nails are used for detoxification and wound healing after sterilization.





This isn't grated cheese.

Not long ago, a Chinese woman from Hebei Province admitted that since childhood, she had been collecting her nail clippings and selling them for 150 yuan per kilogram. And the demand was always there, even greater than she could offer! This is all because human nails are considered an effective means of removing fat and toxins from the body. They also promote wound healing. In traditional Chinese medicine, they're called "jin tui." They're mentioned in an ancient Chinese medical text by physician Sun Simiao during the Tang Dynasty (581-682). There, human nails are mentioned as an ingredient for treating bloating in children. The children of the Tang Dynasty were truly grateful! It's a good thing doctors back then were only available to the rich, and at least poor children weren't tortured with nails.



Nails weighed on apothecary scales!

But enlightened parents heeded this advice. For generations, they burned their nails to ashes and applied the ashes to the mother's breast so that the child could drink this mixture mixed with milk. And traditional Chinese medicine doctors still use nails in their prescriptions. They even prescribed them to patients as a treatment in the 1960s. Nails are scarce; they still need to grow. But people don't give up; they save them for treatment. An adult can only grow 100 grams of nails per year.





This is how they are then ground with a pestle.

So they began looking for ingredients with similar potency. Several alternatives were found, which reduced the spread of nail treatments in China. A new wave of nail popularity arrived in China in 2018. Then a patented medicine called Hou Yan Wan appeared for treating sore throats. One of its ingredients was human nails. And it proved quite popular! Entire medical campaigns began, buying nails from the public. Representatives often go to small villages or ask schoolchildren to collect them through teachers. According to the nail treatment practitioners themselves, the nails are thoroughly cleaned and sterilized, then heat-treated and ground into powder.



In China, a grandmother can leave an inheritance to her granddaughter, even if she didn't really have anything...

Although there's nothing surprising about nails; in special cases, teeth, hair, and even dandruff have been used in various remedies. There's even a treatise, "Compendium of Medicinal Substances," written in China back in the 16th century, that suggests dandruff from combs can be mixed with rice soup or wine to treat headaches. On the one hand, ash is supposedly safe. But on the other, nails contain residues of everything a person has consumed, meaning they can even be slightly toxic. So, a nail-based remedy doesn't inspire me at all, even out of curiosity.



The nail emoji doesn't exist, it can't hurt you. Nail emoji: