Adherents say holistic strategies are misunderstood.

A pharmacist prepared a prescription of traditional Chinese medicine at a hospital in China's Jiangsu Province last month. Traditional remedies tend to be less expensive than Western ones.

The fur is flying, not to mention the acupuncture needles, the herbs, and the $15,000-a-pound bull gallstones.
China's ancient healing arts, as integral to the national identity as the Great Wall or steamed dumplings, have become embroiled in the country's struggle to balance tradition and modernity.

A relatively obscure professor at a regional university kicked off the controversy in October with an online petition calling for traditional medicine to be stripped from the Chinese constitution. It has a protected status in China that, in theory, guarantees it equal footing with its Western counterpart.

Zhang Gongyao and other critics have blasted Chinese medicine as an often ineffective, even dangerous, derivative of witchcraft that relies on untested concoctions and obscure ingredients to trick patients, and then employs a host of excuses if the treatment does not work.

For adherents of the 3,000-year-old system, this borders on heresy.

The Health Ministry labeled Zhang's ideas as "ignorant of history," and traditionalists have called the skeptics traitors bent on "murdering" Chinese culture.

Ironically, the firestorm dovetails with a growing embrace of Chinese medicine abroad as an antidote to the perceived soulless, money-obsessed nature of Western health care.

On a trip to China in mid- December, the US Health and Human Services secretary, Mike Leavitt, said the two countries planned to trade lessons on how to integrate Western and Chinese medicine.

"It's an area of interest for China and the US," he said.

Many Australians, Europeans, and Americans see limitations in advanced science, said Rey Tiquia, a specialist in Chinese traditional medicine based in Australia, even as more Chinese begin to view their traditions as old-fashioned.

"For Chinese," he said, "it's still the lure of something new and shiny, like riding a car rather than a bicycle."

Since 1949, the number of traditional doctors trained in China has fallen by almost half, to 270,000, while the number of Western-trained doctors has jumped twentyfold, to more than 1.7 million.

Criticism that traditional medicine is not scientific dates back centuries.

But Zhang's remedies -- an end to national insurance coverage for traditional medicine, rigorous scientific standards, and obligatory Western training for traditional doctors -- have hit a nerve at a time when adherents of traditional Chinese medicine are increasingly on the defensive.

At Beijing's prestigious Xiehe Hospital, cardiology, gynecology, internal medicine, and other Western specialties are housed in a new 6-story building filled with shiny equipment, well-maintained halls, and renovated toilets.

The traditional medicine department is relegated to eight consulting rooms and a therapeutic facility in an outer building with peeling green paint, water-stained walls, and a foul smell emanating from a dimly lighted toilet.

Some blame skewed financial incentives and a government that is forgetting its roots."The Health Ministry is actually the Ministry of Western Health," said Lin Zhongpeng, a researcher with the Beijing Tianren Yiyi Traditional Medicine Institute. "It's also shocking that doctors get 15 percent kickbacks selling Western drugs."

"The Health Ministry is actually the Ministry of Western Health," said Lin Zhongpeng, a researcher with the Beijing Tianren Yiyi Traditional Medicine Institute. "It's also shocking that doctors get 15 percent kickbacks selling Western drugs."