Tu Youyou (R) chats with Chen Zhu, president of the Chinese Medical Association, before a seminar celebrating Tu Youyou's winning the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in Beijing, capital of China, Oct. 8, 2015. (Photo: Xinhua/Shen Bohan)
Most Chinese doctors are confident in the future of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), a survey has revealed.
Of the 874 doctors polled in a survey by Xinhua and the China Association of Chinese Medicine (CACM), 85.8 percent expressed strong faith in the future of TCM.
Those polled were among the 48,000 doctors trained to improve medical services for ordinary people in an official program launched by CACM in late 2012.
Also, 79.7 percent of the respondents agreed they would support a decision by their children or relatives to work in the TCM field.
However, the survey showed that TCM was threatened by a lack of training and funding, Western medicine and an aversion to using modern processes to produce TCM.
"Institutions should begin to use technology , this is the most urgent matter at the moment," Wu Zhengyu, a doctor from the eastern province of Jiangsu noted.
Tu Youyou, a Chinese researcher who was inspired by TCM and discovered the anti-malaria compound Artemisinin, won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine on Monday. She was the first Chinese national to win a Nobel prize in science.
