SHEN Nong, the 5,000-year-old deity known to the Chinese as the father of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), is terrifying to look at.

He is dressed in loose weeds, has two horns on his head, and in some depictions, a transparent body. Folklore has it that he tasted hundreds of herbs to test its medicinal value.

It was a tough job but he had a natural advantage: To record the herbs' effects, all he had to do was look down in his belly.

SOURCE: Internet

Stories like this are good trivia. But it does little for someone who believes TCM to be shrouded in superstition to put faith in it.

As a child, all I thought about when offered a bowl of foul-smelling Chinese medicine soup was the impish, horned god.

Of course it tasted bad. Just look at the guy who threw up the recipe.

So for years I avoided anything herbal; I was convinced there was nothing more to traditional medicine than folklore and an overactive imagination.

I pushed aside warm ginseng soups my grandmother laboured over. I picked out any suspicious-looking leaf, twig or root hiding in the dishes.

My parochial attitude, however, took a turn recently.

A friend of mine persuaded me to purchase a bottle of concentrated bird's nest, a delicacy of birds' saliva purported to strengthen a person's immune system.

I tasted it. It wasn't bad.

I've been taking a teaspoon of the bottled spit every day for a month now.

While I haven't felt a drastic improvement in my health, I noticed I have more energy. Some days I surprise myself with how focused I am at work.

Sure, it could be the placebo effect, but being older now, I'm grateful for the extra pick-me-up in the day.

In fact TCM has helped countless people improve their lives.

A colleague said it helped her sister manage her endometriosis, a painful womb disorder. Another keeps ginseng pills in her drawer to take whenever she feels a cold coming on.

Since I began my education on the benefits of TCM, I've heard many similar stories but perhaps I should have started at home.

Every week, my mother comes home from the market and stuffs our fridge with paper packages and bottles of innumerable herbs – dried, frozen, and salted in every way imaginable and completely unidentifiable to anyone other than herself.

I realized there must be some truth to its effect: My mother is the most youthful and energetic 55-year-old I know.

The fact is TCM has been studied for thousands of years by scholars, botanists and farmers of the time, filling tomes about herbs like cordyceps, wolfberry and astralagus.

Historians generally agree that books like the the Nei Jing Su Wen (Internal Cannon: Basic Questions) and Ben Cao Gang Mu (Manual of Herbs) were written as early as in the Han dynasty.

So for more than 2,000 years, Chinese physicians have been healing the sick with nothing more than garden-variety plants.

This is valuable information lost in translation as young people increasingly turn to Western prescriptions as their default medicines.

Yesterday, I asked Mr Woo Boon Chong, a TCM practitioner and member of the Singapore Chinese Druggists Association, if traditional medicine would ever fall completely out of favour.

His reply was as short as it was effective in forever replacing my perception of TCM as an idol with a belly full of half-digested weeds.

He said: "Western and Chinese medicines are like the two legs that help us move about. Why would anyone want to stand on only one leg?"

I couldn't agree more.