China's traditional medicine authorities on Wednesday legalized apprenticeships for training doctors as an alternative to medical schools.

"We are trying to follow tradition," said Xu Zhiren, director of the medical administration department of the State Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine (SATCM), at a pressconference.

For thousands of years, doctors of traditional Chinese medicine passed on their knowledge through apprentices, especially from father to son.

When China adopted a modern education system, medical schools supplanted the former system and the administration only recognized school graduates as candidates for practitioner licenses before the new regulation.

But many doctors prefer keeping effective and original prescriptions as "family secrets" and only tell them to people they trust.