You can buy Imodium-type (loperamide hydrochloride) diarrhea medicine in China now. This is great news because 1) loperamide is the only really decent diarrhea medicine in the entire history of diarrhea, and 2) we're in China, the land where delicious but extremely oily foods of questionable origin are sold directly on the filthy streets by unwashed displaced agricultural workers. Ah, home.
Hell, they probably
invented diarrhea here, sometime back in the Tang Dynasty.
Anyway, the Chinese name is
Yi2 Mong2 Ting2. I bought it in Shanghai at 6 tablets for about 6 yuan; in other cities you can probably buy the same box for about 1.5 yuan.
It might help to also be able to name the condition in Chinese:
la4 du2 zi.
My box has pictures of big complex molecules on it...the way medicine
should look. When you buy it, the pharmacy gargoyle will probably wave various nostrums containing extracts of various (probably all counterfeited) roots, leaves, berries, and animal gonads at you. You should wave these off with a derisive laugh and a contemptuous sneer. Don't let them distract you.
I don't know about you, but if I have diarrhea I don't want to spend unnecessary hours or days on the ol' Thunderbucket, contemplating how much gentler the Chinese version is being on my body.
I'm American, dammit, and I want fast, temporary relief. Which
WE invented.