Dataset of traditional Chinese medicines consumption in Shanghai, China

Traditional Chinese medicines (TCMs) are a healing approach that originated in China thousands of years ago and becoming popular in recent years across the world. However, there are potential contaminations such as heavy metals, fungi and pesticides in TCMs, which may be harmful to consumers. Statistical analysis of consumption of traditional Chinese medicines is a notable prerequisite for risk assessment and rational-use policies of traditional Chinese medicines. However, there are few studies on consumption of Chinese medicines. Therefore, the raw data which came from hospitals was analyzed by the programming language of R and MySQL. The analyzed data includes the annual consumption, annual consumption days and average daily consumption of the 16 selected Chinese medicines and all Chinese medicines consumed. The result shows Astragali Radix, Coicis Semen and danshen are the top three of the consumption among the selected Chinese medicines. This dataset lays the foundation for the construction of a Chinese medicine consumption database.