**2. Difference of Kampo medicine and Western medicine**

To select the best Kampo medicine, the patient's condition will be first checked by the crite‐ ria of yin‐yang and xu‐shi categorization (activity and physical fitness) and then narrowed down by the life force, blood and colorless bodily fluids, (if necessary) followed by the five viscera theory and the pulse, tongue and belly (**Figure 2**). As compared with Western medi‐ cine, Kampo medicine is more empirical (rather than scientific), comprehensive (rather than analytical), global (rather than local) and personal (rather than general) and normalizes the patient's condition (rather than removing the cause of disease).

**Figure 2.** Process of grasping the patient's condition prior to the prescriptions of drugs.

During the business sorting work in 2009, the then Japanese regime proposed the exemp‐ tion of insurance against Kampo medicines, fomentations and mouth washes, claiming that Kampo medicine is evidence less and it can be obtained very easily by anybody. However, the patients, herbalists and medical personnel moved against this proposal by means of collecting approximately one million signatures and made the proposal with‐ drawn. Now, in Japan, approximately 150 Kampo medicines and 200 herbal drugs used as decoctions are covered by health insurance. Among the 900 physicians who worked in the core cancer treatment hospitals, 92.4% reported having prescribed Kampo medications [3]. Nationwide, random‐sampled and population‐weighted telephone survey demonstrated that respondents who had used at least one complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) therapy (76.0%) were greater than those who had used orthodox Western medi‐ cine (65.6%) and that the expenditure for CAM was nearly half that of orthodox Western medicine [4]. The most common CAM practice was Kampo, which corresponded to 96.1% of CAM‐practicing doctors [5]. However, it still remains to be clarified why the Kampo medicines exert beneficial effects on our body.
