The Video Call on the Seventh Night of My Business Trip: How We Finally Talked Openly About Japan Tengsu

Let me start with the conclusion: if what you're really asking is "should I buy a particular men's health supplement and take it," that question can't be answered through a screen, and it shouldn't be answered for you by your partner, a coworker, or any product page. The only person who can truly answer it is a doctor or pharmacist who has seen your complete medication and health history. This article isn't here to give you an answer—it's here to share something I went through myself: when anxiety gets magnified by distance, it's easy to blur "researching" and "buying" together, until you forget what you originally wanted to ask.

I'm a process engineer, and I spend about a third of the year traveling for work. This was the seventh night of the trip, staying at that business hotel next to the industrial zone. The room was tiny, and outside the window the factory lights were on twenty-four hours a day. I'd spent over ten hours standing in the cleanroom during the day, and when I got back to my room at night, before I'd even changed clothes, I wanted to video call my wife first. The signal wasn't great—her face kept going in and out of focus—and before we'd said more than a few words, we started arguing. She said every time I travel, it's like I disappear. I said I was so exhausted I didn't even want to talk. After we hung up, I stared at the ceiling and realized what I was anxious about wasn't work—it was that feeling of "I can't keep up with anything."

The next night, I opened my phone. I'd only meant to look up "have I just been too tired lately," but my search bar kept drifting further off course. When you're in a hotel room looking up health information, it's easy to fall into the same trap: first you see someone saying a certain thing really works, then you see someone saying it's completely useless, and then a whole row of store pages pops up, each one claiming to be the cheapest and the fastest to ship. You think you're doing your homework, but really you're just being pushed along by one claim after another. That was me too—I scrolled for over an hour and didn't retain a single thing, only that I was getting more and more irritated.

That night we connected on video again. She spoke first, saying she wasn't trying to control what I buy—she was afraid I'd end up researching and taking things on my own without thinking it through. I turned my phone screen toward her. The whole row of tabs was the same category of keywords, and one of them was a half-typed search for Japan Tengsu. She paused for a second and said, "You're even looking into this?" I said I just wanted to know what it was and why so many people were talking about it—I hadn't decided to take it. She said, then let's look at it together. Read it to me. Don't scroll through it by yourself.

So that's exactly what we did. She was on her end, I was on mine, and we went through several pages from top to bottom. I did the reading, and she did the asking: "Who wrote this page?" "Does it say who they are?" "Does it tell you to buy it directly?" By the third page, we were both laughing, because almost every page was saying the same thing, and yet none of them clearly said who it was actually suitable for. She said, instead of continuing to read what other people say, why not write out our questions and bring them to a professional when I get home.

So we made a list. First, confirm how this kind of product is classified in Taiwan—is it a food or a drug, what does the packaging say, and does it have a permit number? Second, list everything I'm taking, including vitamins, stomach medicine, and the occasional sleep aid I drink—not a single item left out. Third, write my questions out as full sentences, like "Given my current situation, who should I ask first about this kind of thing?" and "If I'm also taking other medications, what should I watch out for?" Fourth, don't order from any page of unknown origin, and don't make decisions late at night. She said, once those four things are done, there's still plenty of time to decide whether to buy.

At this point, I need to be clear about one thing: what we were looking into wasn't "how to buy it the cheapest," but "who should this question go to." A lot of online discussion lumps supplements and prescription drugs together as if they're the same, but in reality their classification, labeling, and how you get them are all different. What we can do is read the information on the packaging carefully, ask clearly about where it came from, and bring our questions to a clinic or pharmacy—not infer what will happen to us from someone else's experience. Any page that says "you'll know once you take it" or "guaranteed to work"—we closed it immediately.

The day I got back, she was waiting for me at the airport. In the car, we didn't argue again. We just went through the list one more time and agreed to make an appointment together the following week, and to ask our questions in person before deciding anything. Looking back, what really helped us make up that night wasn't some amazing piece of information we found—it was that we finally started asking questions the same way. Anxiety doesn't disappear just because you buy something, but when you're willing to lay out your search history and let someone else look through it with you, a lot of things that were blurry start to come into focus.