Appeal for Chinese medicine outweighs diet pill worry.

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Appeal for Chinese medicine outweighs diet pill worry.

 

08/29/2002

The Saigon Times Daily

© 2002 Saigon Times Group

 

(Reuters-SINGAPORE) Chinese medicine, with its 3,000-year-old recipes

featuring herbs and animal parts, is still popular in Singapore as an

alternative to Western drugs, despite a recent drop in sales after a

diet-pill

scandal.

 

The traditional medicine made of items such as dried cicadas, snake gall

bladders and tiger penises often gives new converts the jitters, but the

stomach-churning ingredients are now ground into powder and made into more

palatable capsules and tablets.

" My mom used to take a bus to Chinatown to get some strange herbs and brew

them a few hours, " says Augustine Pang, 36, a university lecturer who uses

Chinese-made flu pills.

 

" Now everything is so convenient. It comes in pills and tablets and is just

as

effective as Western medicine. "

 

It's not only locals who are drawn to the modernized packaging of the

age-old

cures. Some expatriates are giving the remedies a shot.

 

" I'm a little sceptical because of the use of animals, especially snakes and

lizards, " says Belinda Ford, a 29-year-old Australian, who has lived in

Singapore for four years.

 

" But a lot of people... are getting tired of Western chemical cures and

looking for alternative ones like this. "

 

Chinese physicians in Singapore receive about a million visits a year,

according to a journal published by a Chinese medicine body. The government

says there are about three million visits a year to state-run clinics

practicing Western medicine.

 

The city state's population is four million.

 

 

 

Folder Name: Asia Conservation Tiger

Relevance Score on Scale of 100: 85

 

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