"Traditional medicines and herbal medicines, while having different approaches
from conventional western medicine, have been recognized worldwide for their
therapeutic values. The 2003 World Health Assembly (WHA) has enlisted traditional medicine as one of the major health care issues. The World Health Organization’s (WHO) 2002-2005 Traditional Medicine Strategy reported that the traditional
medicine industry worldwide has a net value of over $60 billion US dollars, and
was still increasing. Particularly, Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), which is
a vast knowledge bank of 5000-year medical practices, played an important role
among traditional medicine. In Eastern World, TCM never ceased its popularity
and influence among the society. Recent global TCM and herbal medicine have
market values of approximately $20 billion in US dollar, have annual growth rate of
10-20%. Moreover, TCM user population is also increasing at 20% annual growth
rate. In addition, the “WHO International Standard Terminologies on Traditional
Medicine in the Western Pacific Region” has published standard translation of over
3,000 TCM terminologies for medical practice and scientific researches. Despite
the increased documented importance of TCM, studies in TCM drug discovery
remained a minor part of pharmaceutical researches."
