The modernizing nation with a booming middle class has embraced the use of Western medicine.
Western medicine has no cure for dengue, relying instead on pain relievers and fever reducers.
Many people practise customary law alongside the Western kind and take traditional as well as Western medicine.
But this is one of the fundamental disconnects between Western medicine and what people often refer to as complementary medicine.
While Western medicine generally treats the same illness the same way, Asian medicine operates on the principle that no two people are alike.
Big Pharma could integrate low production cost in China with the quality control of Western medicine and tap a huge domestic demand, Li foresees.
Organisations such as the Traditional Healers Organisation have for years been trying to legitimise the practice and have it held in the same regard as Western medicine.
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.
No one claimed responsibility but Islamist militant group Boko Haram, a sect which has condemned the use of Western medicine, has been blamed for carrying out a spate of assaults on security forces in the city in recent weeks.
The good news was that four of them are in sound working order, a shock given that I don't even know where they are, and thus haven't watered them lately. (In Western medicine-speak, Bramham detected imbalances in my thyroid, thymus and adrenal glands.) To address such afflictions a client would be prescribed two spa treatments and two hours of exercise daily, all custom-tailored, plus a nutritional consultation.
"It's all company spin, " said Anthony Furlan, professor of neurology at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.
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In lab tests, researchers at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine were able to overcome these natural barriers.
"It can sneak up on you, " says Dr. Kevin Mullen, a hepatologist at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.
"For men, the problem was with their genitals, and that was a lot easier to fix than fixing a problem in the brain, " said Sheryl Kingsberg, a clinical psychologist and professor in both the departments of reproductive biology and psychiatry at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.
Last month, the European Union approved Glybera for treatment of a rare genetic disease, making it the first gene-therapy medicine approved in the Western world.
The clinic is run on a voluntary basis and charges Western clients a fee for consultation and medicine, in order to provide a free service for the Nepalis.
Worsening shortages of food and medicine in both eastern and western Libya mean that a conflict prolonged and intensified by outside intervention could create a nationwide humanitarian disaster, whose effects will spill over into those countries that may have the best chance of a successful political transition to more representative government.
More important, traditional Asian medicine is now being taken seriously by Western-educated physicians.
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.
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.
Indonesia's traditional herbal medicine, jamu, for instance, costs a tenth of the price of Western drugs.
In a highly publicised case, a 15-year-old boy from a nomadic tribe in Iran's south-western province of Khuzestan died in July of haemophilia because his family did not have access to medicine.
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