An excellent article in the Wall Street Journal (requires a subscription) about the business of traditional medicine:

" After two unsuccessful attempts to have a child through in vitro fertilization, Melbourne resident Michelle Harrison was willing to try anything. So while getting fertility treatments at Melbourne IVF clinic, she also visited the Melbourne Holistic Health Group for a course of acupuncture. The results were two-fold: the birth in January of Caitlin Aleisha Harrison and, unexpectedly, newfound relief from her annual allergy attacks.

"The hay fever treatment was fantastic," the 35-year-old mother says of the acupuncture therapy. "For the first time in my life, I went through a whole hay fever season without any drugs."

Helping make babies and cutting down on Kleenex costs are two small parts of the growing consumer appetite for products and services derived from ancient Asian medicines. Researchers from consumer-products companies such as Estée Lauder Cos. and Coca-Cola Co. of the U.S., and Japanese cosmetics maker Shiseido Co. are increasingly mining folk medicine to create modern products and treatments.

"The reality is existing Western medicine can't meet current medical needs," says Edmund Lee, executive director of the Hong Kong Jockey Club Institute of Chinese Medicine, which was set up in 2001 and has a $64 million endowment for research into traditional treatments.

Often termed "complementary" or "alternative" medicine in the West, disciplines ranging from Ayurveda in India to traditional Chinese medicine are finding more fans outside Asia. According to data from the alternative medicine division of the National Institutes of Health in the U.S., a 2004 survey showed that more than a third of American adults above the age of 18 use some form of alternative medicine including herbal remedies, acupuncture and meditation. The World Health Organization says that a 2003 survey showed that 75% of people with HIV/AIDS in London and San Francisco were using traditional medicines to augment their standard treatment.

According to figures compiled by the WHO, global sales of herbal remedies totaled more than $21 billion in 2004, the latest year for which data are available. As the number of users of traditional medicines has increased, so have world-wide efforts to regulate their sale. The WHO says that in 1988 only 14 of its member nations regulated the sale of herbal medicines. By 2003, that figure had climbed to 53 countries, with another 42 in the process of developing regulations."