Chinese Herbs and Medicine, Essay Example

One service that is indelibly associated with China is Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM)–in western countries, it is often characterized as an alternative medicine–which involves a vast array of medical treatments  and favors a more natural approach to medicine. Acupuncture, herbal therapy, massage, and exercise training constitute different facets of this renowned Chinese service. China’s National Bureau of Statistics reports that the TCM market constituted a large portion of the Chinese public sector, totaling over 515 billion Yuan annually. TCM is immensely popular in China, yet it is still a burgeoning field in the majority of developed countries including the United States and Japan. Nonetheless, westerners have become increasingly curious and attracted to Chinese medical practices as a highly lucrative market continues to grow internationally. Chinese companies, however, face various challenges because of competition of other countries that have cheaper prices and better technology. TCM indeed represents the fastest nascent activities in China yet still retains the capacity to yield even higher profits. Seventy countries abroad have passed laws that directly address TCM, while one hundred and twenty countries have various TCM institutions in operation. As such, the global TCM market continues to grow by ten to twenty percentage annually. From a Chinese perspective, the positive medical effects of TCM last longer while pernicious side effects are lessened. There is a corpus of literature that attest the assertion that consumers can benefit from TCM because it decreases rates of coronary heart disease and reduces pain levels. Western medicine, on the other hand, has still not ascertained any way to prevent diffuse cardiac problems and the acute pain associated with them. Because Japan remains the country with the highest exporter of traditional medical panaceas and services, TCM marketers must come up with innovative and convincing advertising and marketing strategies in order to convince Japanese consumers of the superiority of TCM to traditional Japanese medicine.

Although historically the Japanese have conveyed an unequivocal antagonism towards the Chinese market and importing Chinese goods, there are several rhetorical strategies that TCM marketers could use in order to galvanize the Japanese to consume Chinese medical services and purchase Chinese medicinal panaceas. Japan has become increasingly westernized, so marketing strategies deployed in the Western world to market products and services to a Japanese audience proffers a promising forum that Chinese advertisers could use. Research shows that potent antibiotics used in the West are often abused by consumers, which is why some bacteria cultures have developed ample resistance to them, thereby rendering them obsolete. Public policies in the West thus have been passed in order to restrict such widespread use and abuse of antibiotics. In contrast, TCM has been proven to be an effective treatment of various infectious diseases that in the West had been cured through antibiotics. The efficacy of TCM in comparison to Western medicine must be presented in a dyadic fashion in order to stress to the Japanese how TCM should be the preferred recourse for treating various diseases and illnesses.  Many popular TCM panaceas effectively function as antibiotics, including the Banglangen granules in addition to the Shuanghuanglian mixture. The antibacterial mechanisms of TCM differ from Western antibiotics because of the way each form of medicine cures certain diseases and illnesses. TCM helps cure diseases by enhancing the body’s immunity so that the nefarious bacteria can never build up a resistance to the remedies. Chinese specialists have thus predicted that TCM currently being practice has an optimistic future for the treatment of so-called factious illnesses and diseases. For this reason, many Chinese families as well as Americans have opted to use TCM as a home panacea. Ultimately, Western modes of thinking regarding illness and how to treat symptoms of diseases starkly contrasts from the Chinese perception of the human body from a holistic perception. Such contrasting views of the human body and role of medicine in curing diseases has ultimately moved TCM from the periphery to the center, and it continues to climb in popularity.

Despite the fact that Japan continues to lead the world in the export of traditional medicine, the market for TCM has increasingly spread to and been embraced by Western countries, including the U.S. in which acupuncture has legal status in almost all of the fifty states. This statistic of rapidly increasing demand for the products suggests that the American public recognizes the medicinal and therapeutic advantages of TCM. In 2007, the United States acknowledged for the first time that TCM was a viable medical system with a complete practice and theory foundation and epistemological validity. The Japanese have developed technologies that are far more superior than those used in China, which has resulted in the Japanese putting a stranglehold on the market share for TCM. Nonetheless, TCM remains an immensely lucrative business with burgeoning industrial output. Marketing TCM through the prism of wellness in Japan along with other countries would yield great success for TCM services. TCM marketing itself has been perceived as its own business because a litany of companies sought to proffer marketing solutions for both TCM companies and TCM practitioners. Marketers must underscore how cost-effective TCM is in comparison to Western medicine, so the Chinese need to impart to Japanese consumers the notion that Chinese methodologies for medicine utilized to diagnose patients in addition to the use of acupuncture and herbs for other ailments and pain relief come at a much lower cost than other alternative means.