Medical-industry slang, literally 'flying knife'. A surgeon from a big-city hospital travels, often by plane and often on a weekend, to another hospital, usually smaller or more remote, to perform one specific operation, then goes home. The host hospital or the patient's family pays the fee. For years this was done outside the surgeon's home institution and in a grey zone, mostly over how the fee was paid and who was responsible; China has since added formal routes such as multi-site practice registration and hospital-to-hospital consultation rules, but the word stuck. Small Town Remedy is adapted from Liu Sanshu's novel titled 飞刀: the hero's career in a top hospital unravels after one such operation goes wrong, which is what sends him home to a small northeastern town. The title points to the surgery, not to a wuxia throwing knife.
Dramas
Where it comes up
Small Town Remedy: How a Town Takes a Man Back
A boy sent south at eight comes home in his thirties to a Northeastern town he no longer knows. Small Town Remedy is less about whom its doctor cures than about how the town refuses to leave him alone, and about the actor who says he had never wanted a role this much.
