Ancient Cures, Modern Medicine Clash : Korea: Traditional ways vie with new cures, not only for patients but for referrals and insurance reimbursement.

In a hole-in-the-wall pharmacy off a crowded side street, the shelves hold familiar brands of aspirin and cough syrup--along with exotic remedies like ginseng, bear claw and reindeer antler.

It might look like an example of modern medicine coexisting with traditional Asian cures.

But, in fact, South Korean pharmacists have fought a long battle with traditional healers over who has the right to dispense herbal remedies.

That dispute, in turn, is part of a larger struggle between the modern medical Establishment and so-called Oriental doctors, who practice centuries-old healing methods like acupuncture, massage and meditation.

“They try to make one system, one way to practice medicine,” said Dr. Kang Sung-keel, an acupuncturist who teaches at the College of Oriental Medicine at Seoul’s Kyunghee University. “They ignore our methods and don’t believe in them.”

In a treatment room across from his office, Kang’s patients recline in curtained cubicles.

A young man’s face bristles with needles.

A middle-aged woman lies on her side with a cone of compressed moxa leaf burning on her cheek, filling the air with a bitter-musk fragrance.

Many South Koreans prefer traditional herbal doctors to those trained in Western medical methods. Oriental medicine is a multimillion-dollar business here.

But people are also proud of South Korea’s near-miraculous economic growth in the 1970s, which helped the country build a modern medical Establishment.

Public health professionals cite steep drops in the incidence of infectious diseases and infant mortality and point to the role of vaccinations, new clinics and hospitals and stricter regulation of medications.

Oriental practitioners say much of their medicine is preventive, and its effects are thus harder to quantify.

Under the law, traditional practitioners must be licensed by the government. They undergo a minimum of six years’ training. Students compete fiercely for places at one of the country’s 11 Oriental medical schools.

Despite what they describe as high professional standards, the herbal doctors believe the system works against them.

Most South Korean insurance covers only limited treatment by Oriental doctors, so their services tend to cost patients more.

The herbal doctors also say government regulators are more likely to come from the ranks of Western-style medicine--and thus are more sympathetic to the medical Establishment.

Western-style doctors, they complain, generally refuse to cooperate with referrals, provide medical records or perform lab and other tests for patients who are seeing an Oriental doctor.

Traditional Asian medicine is not without its modern aspects. Acupuncture needles were once fashioned of jade and fish bone; now they are stainless steel and disposable. Kang’s young students use computer imaging to map meridians, or energy pathways.

In the school’s herbal pharmacy, wooden drawers labeled with Chinese characters stretch from floor to ceiling, like a room-sized version of an old apothecary chest. On a work table, herbs are heaped in fragrant piles--deep red, pale feathery green, sticky black--for hand-wrapping into paper packets.

But despite the pharmacy’s tradition-steeped air, prescriptions are computerized and code-numbered, and a digital scoreboard in the waiting room advises patients when theirs are ready.

The herbalists have tried to win a ban on Western-style pharmacies selling herbal cures, saying they alone should be allowed to dispense them. A law taking effect this summer will restrict such sales in the next few years, but not halt them outright.