Lemon and Sugar with Your Urine?
Hospitals in China have come under fire recently for charging excessive fees and prescribing unnecessary medications, so reporters from the China News Service decided to conduct a test. They submitted urine samples to several hospitals in the city of Hangzhou, but substituted tea for the urine.
Six out of the 10 hospitals reported that the patient’s urinary tracts were infected and five of the hospitals prescribed expensive medication.
Health officials blame the problem on recent market reforms that have cut off state subsidies, leaving hospitals to resort to tactics like this to survive.
In a related story, chocolate was substituted for stool samples submitted for testing at several Swiss hospitals and four out of five reported that Godiva tasted better than Ghirardelli. All five indicated that Hershey’s tasted like shit.
Source: Reuters
Posted: March 22nd, 2007 under Nutty News.
Comments: 5
Comments
Comment from Hyo
Time: March 22, 2007, 7:42 pm
The lettering on that cup is Korean.
Comment from Mithotyn
Time: March 22, 2007, 11:50 pm
Dude it’s a gag to mess with news radio hacks.
Comment from Hammer
Time: March 23, 2007, 8:55 am
What lettering Hyo? 
Yeah, Reuters is well known for their gags.
Comment from bobbarama
Time: March 24, 2007, 3:10 pm
Well, it’s not exactly a scientific study, but I always suspected Godiva was better than Ghiradelli. My only concern now is that someone will swap the stool samples back in and I won’t know the difference!
Comment from ericschmerick
Time: March 27, 2007, 3:52 am
Hmmm, hard to believe. My wife was just in Shanghai East here in Shanghai, and the prices were so (so,so,so,so) reasonable compared with US prices. Literally, there were some medications (regular, western medications like prednisone) she was given that were 0.05RMB / pill (that’s less than 1 cent). Four days in the hospital (on the special VIP western ward) was only $2.5K USD, and the quality of care was at least 3x better than the typical US hospital (in terms of nurse/dr to patient ratio, attentiveness, etc).
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