For Western Medicine you go to the drug store and buy a bottle of pills that are manufactured somewhere with something in them that you hope works. At times a real improv.
For Chinese medicine the powders or cures or remedies are made from dried real plant materials and specifically tailored to what ails you.
They are either ground up for you at the pharmacy and you take them home in a powder form and drink them in hot water, or you take the small pile of designated dried plants home, boil it up for a couple of hours and then drink it. Makes an awful-lot-of-sense-to-me. These photos are from a pharmacy in Chinatown and the hand is that of the pharmacist. The other wonderful part of this is, the interior of the pharmacy smells of herbs and spices. It clears your head just to enter the space.