A study of various nomenclatures for medicine of East Asian origin

Abstract

There are many names for the medicine that people around East Asian countries have used for thousands years. This is partly because it encountered medicine from abroad, and partly because it has been used worldwide. This paper discusses the different names used for medicine of East Asian origin and the tendencies in using specific names that appear in the literature. We selected 17 names that appeared to represent this type of medicine based on frequency and circumstantial meanings to retrieve PubMed articles spanning 1919 to 28th Oct. 2014: ‘Alternative Medicine,’ ‘Chinese Medicine,’ ‘Classical Chinese Medicine,’ ‘Complementary Medicine,’ ‘Complementary and Alternative Medicine,’ ‘East Asian Medicine,’ ‘Eastern Medicine,’ ‘Kampo Medicine,’ ‘Korean Medicine,’ ‘Korean Traditional Medicine,’ ‘Oriental Medicine,’ ‘Traditional Chinese Medicine,’ ‘Traditional Korean Medicine,’ ‘Traditional Japanese Medicine,’ ‘Traditional Vietnamese Medicine,’ and ‘Unconventional Medicine’. Based on the literature review of PubMed data, it was found that Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is most frequently used among the aforementioned names as it appeared in 41.49 % (8,958 out of 21,588 papers) of the papers retrieved. Complementary and alternative medicine is next at 20.89 % (4,511 out of 21,588 papers). The use of these two names is increasing rapidly, but further analysis shows that Chinese are more likely to use TCM while non-Chinese tend not to use TCM.