http://www.bloomberg.com/news/.....maker-pipelines.html

Chinese medicine now influencing major pharma

Yes probably so they can extract one or two compounds from a plant, patent it and cash in on the natural health dollars which are rapidly inclining....a hand in every basket!
In saying that however I guess it is better than synthetic drugs & maybe more dollars will be put into botanic research???  but then they can name their price!  

Look for a push to put small producers out of business to gain market share by the big guys. Oh wait, it's already happening.

Yeah, Serenity...that's my take on it too.  

There's one drug we use without hesitation: Guifenesin.  We all have mild asthma (the pediatrician called it 'reactive airways' in the kids) and we don't really notice it except when we get any sort of congestion.  Whatever we get goes straight to serious bronchitis and then, for me, very quickly becomes pneumonia.  To prevent that, when the chest congestion begins, we start taking Expec.  http://www.naturade.com/Natura.....p92.html  

You can get it at some health food stores.  It's got all sorts of great herbal expectorants and decongestants.  But when push comes to shove, and hacking cough becomes whooping, we gotta do something more than just cherry bark.  At any rate, when I was researching Guifenesin today, I ran across this :http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaiacum   The plant they patterned the drug after.  I wish I could grow it here.  But what I can grow here is olives, and we're also taking olive leaf extract.  It's said to be very potent stuff and I look forward next time we get a cough to maybe only trying the live leaf extract.  I've ordered olive trees and I can't wait to put them in the ground!

Neither links are working, but if anybody's interested, it's easy enough to google.