Many people practise customary law alongside the Western kind and take traditional as well as Western medicine.

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But Western medicine doctors in China often look down on colleagues who practice traditional Chinese medicine, scoffing that it lacks scientific grounding, even if its precepts have been accepted by billions of people for thousands of years.

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Many doctors, both Western and traditional, feel that "integrated" medicine - a blend of the modern and the ancient - could be the therapy of the future.

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More important, traditional Asian medicine is now being taken seriously by Western-educated physicians.

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Officially, 1, 273 Western drug formulations are sold in China, far more than the 564 traditional Chinese medicine formulas, according to the 2005 Chinese Pharmacopoeia.

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Indonesia's traditional herbal medicine, jamu, for instance, costs a tenth of the price of Western drugs.

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