How Chinese Medicine Quietly Took Over America

Chinese medicine is quietly taking over America.

You’re probably thinking I’ve lost my mind. A tradition that even young people in its own country sometimes shrug at — that’s conquering America?

Fair enough. Let me put my cards on the table first, because who’s telling you this matters. I’m a licensed pharmacist in China, 17 years behind the hospital pharmacy counter, trained in “integrated Chinese and Western medicine.” I’ve filled prescriptions from both sides of that line, and I’ve watched patients on both sides make the same mistakes. So this isn’t a cheerleading piece, and it isn’t a hit job. I’m going to show you some numbers, then tell you what I think they actually mean.

The first number: $13.23 billion

That’s what Americans spent on herbal dietary supplements in 2024, according to the American Botanical Council’s 2024 Herb Market Report, published in September 2025. A record — up 5.4% from 2023, an extra $680 million in a single year.

Hard to feel a number that big. Try this: spread across every man, woman and child in the country, that’s about $40 per American per year. And that’s an average. The people actually buying this stuff are spending a lot more.

One more caveat, because it matters: that $13.23 billion only covers herbal dietary supplements. It doesn’t include traditional Chinese medicine decoctions, finished Chinese patent medicines, or acupuncture and tui na (Chinese therapeutic massage) sessions. Just one slice of the iceberg — the part above the water.

So what are Americans actually buying?

The top five best-selling herbal ingredients in 2024, counted through mainstream retail — grocery, drug and mass-market stores, not health-food shops:

Rank	Ingredient	2024 Sales
1	Psyllium	$289.5 million
2	Elderberry	$145.2 million
3	Ashwagandha	$144.5 million
4	Turmeric	$141.8 million
5	Beetroot	$117 million

Here’s the part that made me laugh: America’s best-selling “herbal remedy” isn’t ginseng, and it isn’t reishi. It’s psyllium — a laxative fiber, the stuff that goes into Metamucil. People are chasing what they imagine are exotic Eastern botanicals, and the top of the shelf is a stool softener. The channel-by-channel breakdown is published here.

Turmeric, at #4, should look familiar. It sits beside ginger, cinnamon and garlic on that list — all staples of the Chinese kitchen, and of the old Chinese idea that food and medicine share the same roots. And in the natural channel — health-food stores, counted separately — turmeric has now been the top-selling herbal supplement for three straight years. Same plant, different shelf. On the mainstream list it sits at #4; in health-food shops it leads.

But supplements are just the quietest layer. The interesting stuff is in the three things below.

One: a bottle of syrup

Nin Jiom Pei Pa Koa. The recipe dates to the 1600s and, by the company’s own telling, hasn’t changed since. In 2024 it did 635 million RMB — roughly $88 million — up nearly a third from 2019, sold in more than 20 countries.

How did it catch fire in America? The 2018 flu season — the worst in nearly a decade — and New Yorkers rediscovering a dark, muddy-looking, very sweet cough syrup. The Wall Street Journal wrote about it, and shares of Kingworld Medicines, the Hong Kong-listed company that distributes it (not the manufacturer), spiked as much as 55% intraday before closing up around 25%. On Amazon, third-party sellers were asking several times the shelf price. Then came the celebrity wave: Zayn Malik of One Direction swears by it; Cynthia Erivo and Jonathan Bailey, stars of Wicked, have talked it up. TikTok videos on how to take it have racked up millions of views, and Google searches for “Pei Pa Koa” were up a quarter over the previous year.

Why? It rode a wave — the “biohacking” culture among young Westerners, people trying strange, sometimes dubious things to make their bodies “better.” Gua sha rode the same wave. Here’s the uncomfortable part: a big share of Chinese medicine’s current popularity in America is about trend, not evidence.

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Two: drug discovery

This is the one that actually wins Americans over.

Tu Youyou isolated artemisinin from sweet wormwood — qinghao — and took the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The trail starts with a line in Ge Hong’s Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergencies (《肘后备急方》), written in the Eastern Jin dynasty: “Take a handful of qinghao, soak it in two sheng of water, wring out the juice, and drink it all.”

It’s not the only one. Ephedrine, from ephedra, became a bronchodilator. Salicin, from willow bark, became aspirin. NCCIH — the U.S. National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health — says it plainly: many modern drugs originally came from natural products.

Three: acupuncture

Acupuncture has traveled even further than the herbs.

The numbers: about 3.1 million American adults had used acupuncture in the past year back in 2007, per NHIS. By 2022, adult use had more than doubled since 2002 — 1% of adults then, 2.2% now. An industry survey by the NCCAOM in 2004 put it at about one in ten Americans having tried it at some point — a looser measure than NHIS, which counts only the past year, so the two numbers aren’t really comparable. In 2018, President Trump signed H.R. 6, the SUPPORT Act, which directed federal health officials to study non-drug pain treatments, acupuncture among them; the acupuncture profession read that as its first foothold in federal law. Today there are thousands of acupuncture and TCM clinics across the U.S., and about 38,000 licensed acupuncturists as of early 2018 — usually rounded to “close to 40,000”.

So… is Chinese medicine winning?

Let me be blunt: selling well is not the same as working.

This is the line both Chinese and English internet discourse love to blur. There are two camps, and neither convinces the other.

The evidence camp says: no modern-standard evidence, no acceptance. A formula used for two thousand years? Long history is not evidence. Placebo, natural recovery, a self-limiting illness that would have ended on its own — all of it can make you feel better. So they ask one question: where’s the randomized controlled trial? What’s the sample size? Was it double-blind? No answer — into the “unproven” pile it goes.

The lived-experience camp says: I did it, and I got better. Acupuncture fixed my neck. Tui na let me stand up straight. Three doses of herbs and the cough loosened. You say there’s no evidence — isn’t my body evidence?

I understand both camps, because I’m half in each.

17 years behind a hospital pharmacy counter, trained in integrated Chinese and Western medicine — so let me be precise.

Vitamin D will not cure your cold. And curcumin, from that turmeric everyone’s buying — don’t casually pair it with blood thinners. It may increase bleeding risk.

And just as confidently: acupuncture is not mysticism. American hospitals increasingly use it as a legitimate pain tool, and for chronic low back pain and tension-type headache, the literature offers some supporting evidence.

So my position is this: don’t pick a side. Split it into layers.

Chinese medicine isn’t one thing. It’s a grab bag. A few items in it have been validated by modern medicine — and taken. Artemisinin is the cleanest example. A few have partial evidence — acupuncture, for certain indications. And a large pile of it is tradition plus personal experience, with the evidence still catching up.

And the thing that should actually worry you is the illusion that “natural” means “harmless.” People mixing herbs with prescription drugs, or self-supplementing on top of medication — that’s where the problems show up. It’s medicine. Treat it like medicine. Which is exactly why someone who speaks both languages should be saying this out loud.

I want to hear from you: have you had your own run-in with Chinese medicine or herbs? Cured by it, burned by it, or just not buying it? Comment below — I read every single one.

Going forward, I’m writing about integrated medicine from this chair: what’s actually backed by evidence, what’s just experience, what’s a trap — and especially drug safety. Subscribe and it lands in your inbox. Free subscribers also get my cold-medicine ingredient chart by email — one page, one row per product — because a lot of people stack cold meds without realizing the active ingredients overlap. Subscribe and it comes with the welcome email.

Sources

• American Botanical Council. “US Sales of Herbal Supplements Increased by 5.4% in 2024.” Press release, 10 September 2025. herbalgram.org
• NutraIngredients. “US herbal supplements sales hit a record $13.2 billion in 2024.” 10 September 2025. nutraingredients.com
• The Economist. “A 400-year-old Chinese cough syrup is winning over Westerners.” 14 August 2025. economist.com
• The Wall Street Journal. “A Cough Syrup Goes a Different Kind of Viral. Its Stock Soars.” 26 February 2018. wsj.com
• National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. “Acupuncture: Effectiveness and Safety.” nccih.nih.gov
• National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. “Use of Complementary Health Approaches: 20-Year Trends.” nccih.nih.gov
• Fan AY, et al. “Distribution of licensed acupuncturists and educational institutions in the United States at the start of 2018.” Complementary Therapies in Medicine. 2018;41:295-301. PubMed
• U.S. Congress. H.R.6 — SUPPORT for Patients and Communities Act (Public Law 115-271), signed 24 October 2018. congress.gov

If the vocabulary itself is what trips you up — qi, dampness, blood stasis — I have written those out in plain language: what qi actually means, and what dampness is.

And one more thing I’m working on: many “herbal medicines” from China are sold in America as something they technically aren’t — dietary supplements. Under U.S. law, they don’t need FDA approval before hitting shelves. How much does that gap matter? That’s the next piece. Subscribers see it first.

And if you know someone who sips herbal tea in the morning and swallows prescriptions at night — send them this. They might need the reminder.

This is general health education, not personalized medical advice. I’m a hospital pharmacist — if you’re thinking about starting, stopping, or changing any supplement, talk with your doctor or pharmacist first.

Written in Chinese, brought into English with AI — the experience and the judgment are mine.

There is a labeling layer under all of this, and it is where most of these products quietly stall: a formula can sell here for years and still be a dietary supplement on paper — no pre-market approval, no review of whether it works. That gap is where Chinese herbal formulas stall in the US.