Chinese Medicine: Starting with Daily Intelligence-Chapter 195: A Special Anorexia Patient

By the time they arrived at Ding’s Pharmaceutical Factory, the sky had already darkened.

Li Xu had called Ding Kaifang on the way.

So, Ding Kaifang was already waiting for them at the entrance.

"Doctor Li!" Ding Kaifang’s eyes kept darting toward the truck. "Is this the batch...?"

Li Xu nodded and gestured for the driver to open the cargo bay.

Ding Kaifang eagerly climbed into the truck, untied a burlap sack, and grabbed a handful of unhulled rice. He brought it to his nose and took a deep sniff, his expression instantly becoming one of pure bliss.

"Huh, this is much more fragrant than last time."

Ding Kaifang looked surprised.

Last time, when his daughter ate it, the rice was coarse and didn’t have much of a fragrance.

He hadn’t even wanted to eat it himself.

But his daughter had eaten it with great delight.

"The aroma is different this time. Will it still be effective?"

Ding Kaifang voiced his doubts.

Li Xu said, "Don’t worry, it’s effective."

The last batch was wild rice, so its flavor was naturally inferior.

This particular variety is prized for its fragrant aroma.

It’s a genuine, premium-grade rice.

Since it was grown in the same place, its therapeutic effect on anorexia is identical.

There were three sacks of rice in total.

Ding Kaifang called over two workers, who quickly moved them into the warehouse.

This was no ordinary warehouse.

It was equipped with a complete temperature and humidity control system, keeping the interior dry and exceptionally clean.

There was even a keypad lock on the door.

It was previously used to store valuable medicinal ingredients.

However, this rice was even more valuable than those ingredients.

In the office,

Ding Kaifang picked up a calculator and punched in some numbers with a flurry of clicks. "Right now, the miracle drugs on the market for treating severe anorexia cost around fifty thousand for a course of treatment, and the results aren’t even stable. But your rice... based on Duoduo’s dosage, half a kilogram is enough for a single patient’s course of treatment, and it’s basically guaranteed to work..."

He took a deep breath and turned the calculator toward Li Xu. "Conservatively, these seventy-five kilograms of polished rice have a market value of at least twelve million!"

Li Xu raised his eyebrows. That figure was indeed higher than he’d expected.

Next, they discussed how to split the profits.

This time was different from before.

With the previous Mao Duddu Eye Drops and True Martial Pills,

even though the ingredients were just as precious,

the processing and marketing accounted for a large portion of the cost.

But with this rice,

the ingredient itself was the most valuable part.

Once it was processed, it wouldn’t need any special promotion.

As long as one patient found out about it,

word would spread within the patient community,

and other patients would come to buy it.

Therefore, the subsequent costs would be low.

The two decided on an 80-20 split.

Li Xu would take eighty percent of the profits from the sale of the Strongly Fragrant Dry Rice Pills, and Ding’s Pharmaceutical Factory would take twenty percent.

They then moved on to discussing the production process for the dry rice pills.

Following the hints from his information, Li Xu instructed, "It can’t be machine-dried. It must be air-dried naturally, and the temperature cannot exceed forty degrees Celsius. The dehusking must also be gentle to keep the germ intact."

"Understood!" Ding Kaifang noted down every requirement carefully. "I’ll personally supervise and use my best workers. For the packaging, I was thinking of using..."

"Simple and plain is fine," Li Xu cut him off. "Nitrogen-flushed foil bags. Don’t do anything flashy. This is a medicine, not a health supplement."

Ding Kaifang nodded repeatedly, then suddenly remembered something. "Right, as for the pricing...?"

Li Xu pondered for a moment. "Let’s go with the market price."

There was no need to set a low price for something like this.

They needed to make a decent profit, after all.

The sky had grown dark.

Ding Kaifang had the two of them stay for dinner.

After dinner,

Song Sisi headed back,

and Li Xu returned to his clinic with ten kilograms of rice.

He didn’t go to sleep right away.

Instead, he pulled out a patient’s case file.

It belonged to an anorexia patient who had proactively sought him out some time ago.

It was just that he had run out of the special rice, so he’d had to make her wait until now.

The patient’s name was Ji Youyou.

She suffered from "anorexia nervosa."

To put it simply: eating is a fundamental human instinct, but when a person develops other feelings about the act of eating—feelings that are overwhelmingly negative and terrifying—even that instinct can be subverted.

According to what he knew,

she was thirty years old and a moderately famous singer.

In the eyes of her fans, she was extroverted and lively, with a considerable net worth, but in reality, she had been suffering from anorexia for many years.

Her story began in her childhood.

Ji Youyou was born in the 1990s.

Her family consisted of her parents and a brother who was three and a half years older.

At the age of four, Ji Youyou studied ballet, tap dancing, and acrobatics, and she was already singing with her brother at that time.

When Ji Youyou was a child, she was overweight. She was often mocked for it, while her family simply called it "baby fat."

But this didn’t affect Ji Youyou’s extroverted and lively nature. As a young girl, she was like a tomboy, loving all kinds of ball sports. Even when she was in a bad mood, she still acted happy.

In high school, Ji Youyou was an excellent basketball player.

Her athletic performance, academics, and even her social life were all great.

Her brother, however, wasn’t very well-liked.

But even so, she adored her brother.

At fourteen, Ji Youyou began performing as a drummer in a duo with her brother.

At nineteen, they were signed by a media company and began recording an album.

At this stage of her career, Ji Youyou was asked to step out from behind the drums and come to the center of the stage to be the lead singer.

Although reluctant, she agreed, and this made Ji Youyou increasingly conscious of her appearance.

When she was twenty, Ji Youyou’s record sales were excellent, but she felt it was all thanks to her brother’s efforts.

In their band, her brother was in complete control.

He was a "strong-willed, uncompromising, ambitious, yet aggressive" person.

He was always seen as the genius, while Ji Youyou was considered just "a singer who also played the drums."

But this assessment felt true to Ji Youyou. She let her brother manage their entire music career, while she herself merely "meticulously noted down every work arrangement."

In her family life, Ji Youyou’s mother was an extremely controlling woman.

On one hand, she was the family disciplinarian, keeping the house spotlessly clean.

On the other, she constantly controlled every member of the family, especially Ji Youyou.

This became even more apparent when, as an adult, Ji Youyou’s desire to move out was denied.

Furthermore, she seemed to have a natural tendency to put Ji Youyou down.

For example, whenever someone praised Ji Youyou, she would immediately say, "Her brother does it better."

The message was clear: You should never be placed in a position higher than your brother.

And Ji Youyou’s brother perfectly inherited their mother’s controlling nature.

He was widely known as a "tyrant in the recording studio" and always kept Ji Youyou firmly in his grasp.

Growing up in such a family, Ji Youyou developed an inferiority complex.

She constantly felt inferior and unattractive, and she desperately craved love and validation from her family.

As Ji Youyou’s career skyrocketed, she began to exhibit perfectionist and obsessive-compulsive tendencies.

Her own home became a replica of her parents’ environment—spotless and perfectly organized.

And it was then that the first signs of anorexia began to appear.