An experiment in empathy

In my last entry, I talked about the way we build up day-to-day knowledge over the years. How knowledge is mixed in with experience, and beaten into shape by frequent use. How as a newcomer to a situation, we can get an off-the-shelf knowledge product, but how that just isn't an equivalent.

I wondered if this would feel the same to an American woman arriving in the UK. So I tried an experiment. Try it with me, if you will.

Imagine you have moved to some rural corner of England, and you have nettles in the wild space at the bottom of the garden. Your child tries to pick one and gets stung. You ring a friend, and she says "oh nettle rash, don't worry about that. Just get a dock leaf and rub the juice on, or, um, I think it's bicarbonate of soda that's meant to help, or is that for wasp stings? I can never remember. Anyway, don't worry, it'll go in a few hours."

These Brits, you are thinking to yourself at this point, they're so vague. And dock leaves? What is this? The Dark Ages?

So you google "nettles", and you find an entry in Wikipedia where you get a picture of a limb covered in a rash. See it there on the right hand side? Not very pretty. Then you go to NHS Direct which you think will be fairly authoritative. As you read the article on nettle rash, you very quickly start learning about acute urticaria, chronic urticaria, and within a paragraph or two, you are into angioedema, which can cause swelling of the lining of the mouth, the windpipe and, in men, the genitals. Click down to the “treatment” section, and you see it mentions nothing about dock leaves (which you’re kind of relieved about, as this would only confirm your darkest anxieties about the NHS), but you find it talks about steroids, their side-effects, and emergency hospital treatment if breathing becomes severely affected. See what I mean. You’ve gone from a small patch of itchy hives to emergency hospital treatment in a few minutes, and you’re adrift.

You might also remember having heard about nettle tea. You want to understand as much as you can about this obsession with tea which is such a part of the British life, so while you're on the subject, you have a go at googling that. Why on earth would anyone risk stings, hives, swelling of the genitals and possibly emergency hospital treatment for a cup of tea, when you can buy several different brands at the supermarket? Your search doesn't bring much enlightenment. One of the first Google results for nettle tea tells you that "nettle tea [isn't] better than regular black tea, it's just different".

Not better, just different.

.