There has been an increased professionalisation and commercialisation of traditional medicine in response to the development of biomedicine. This trend is not specific to AIDS and not necessarily a recent development. Social scientists first noted this trend in the late 1980s: Charles Leslie [3] for example has shown how, in India, in response to an increased authority of biomedicine and the globalisation of health markets, Unani and Ayurvedic medicine production changed; and Afdhal and Welsch [4] described the rise of 'modern' jamu in Indonesia. Jamu is the traditional term for Indonesian indigenous medicines usually prepared from herbal medicines such as leaves, bark, roots and flowers. Nowadays a multimillion dollar industry is involved in the production of Ayurvedic and Unani medicines in India, and of jamu in Indonesia. A rapidly expanding assortment of powders, creams, pills, capsules and cosmetics has been manufactured both in small cottage industries as in large factories with increasingly sophisticated technologies [3, 4] . The modernization of the manufacturing of these drugs has been accompanied with more modern biomedical modes of presenting their efficacy [5] . Under globalization, similar trends occurred in other regions and these products diffused more rapidly.