Genetically Medicated?

Anyone thinking about having a medical but unsure where they might go could do worse than travel to Sha Tin and check out the Centre for Research and Promotion of Women’s Health (as it is known in some quarters – most notably their own letterhead) or the Centre of Research and Promotion of Women’s Health (as it is known on its website – though not the on the CUHK Faculty of Medicine website; well, not on some pages).

The basic “body check”, as they call these things in these parts, will knock you back HK$1,150 (that’s inclusive of a $100 1-year membership fee which gives you a discount of $210 on the standard charge of $1,260 – hey, this is Hong Kong, where no offer is bona fide if it’s simple). The location is a short walk from the railway station at the Lek Yuen Health Centre (call 2609-5100 for an appointment).

This is the second time I’ve used this centre and it’s perfectly serviceable. What did surprise me this time was that the staff seem to have been mugging up on Cross-cultural Studies 101. I was mildly surprised when the nurse offered the opinion that the reason more women than men were graduating from the medical faculties of Chinese U and HKU was because they were “more clever”, but this was nothing in comparison to the eye-opening I received (it merely looked like eyebrow raising, doc) when the Director of the Centre of/for Research and Promotion of Women's Health, Professor Carmen Wong, upon hearing that I played badminton with my wife, asked me whether she was Chinese.

Resisting the impulse to tell her to mind her own business, I replied that yes she was.

“Genetics,” she said. “She’d be better.”

I predict big things for Prof Wong, if not locally then certainly in the Mainland.