DAAN Chinese Herbs and Acupuncture

Even though China is opening up to the west in many ways, traditional Chinese medicine continues to be widely used:

“Colleen Cheng and Angel Chen, Chinese marketing executives in their 30s, should be the ideal customers for U.S. and European drugmakers. So far, they are a tough sell.

Glued to cell phones at an expensive Beijing restaurant, the working moms would fit in at any cafe in New York or London with their fluent English and stylish clothing.

They spend hundreds of dollars monthly on herbs, acupuncture and supplements. What they don’t buy are Western pharmaceuticals, like Johnson & Johnson’s cold medicine Sudafed and Sanofi-Aventis SA’s sleeping pill Ambien.

“With Chinese medicine, it is all about balance,” Cheng says. For a cold, she boils ginger root in Coca-Cola. Rather than take a sleeping pill, Chen drinks Chinese white wine. “The effect of the Chinese medicine is very slow, but we continue to take it because we believe it is better for our overall health,” Cheng says.

While China’s middle class has fallen for Buick cars and Starbucks coffee, medicines made by Western drugmakers haven’t caught on as quickly. The average Chinese spends $10 a year on pharmaceuticals compared with $900 for each American. The world’s biggest drugmakers, including Pfizer Inc., Johnson & Johnson and GlaxoSmithKline Plc, need to court customers like Cheng and Chen as sales growth slows in the mature U.S. and European markets. “

Tags: General, East and West, Culture //