Temple prescription slips as living ethnomedicine: practitioner knowledge and exploratory bioinformatics mapping of Malaysian Chinese folk therapeutics

Temple prescription slips are Chinese religious-medical texts that combine divination practice, materia medica knowledge and household self-care. Malaysian Chinese temple slips remain poorly documented, particularly with respect to sampling, transcription, source identification, safety issues and reproducible informatics analysis. A complete on-site convenience census of 106 publicly accessible prescription slips from the Goddess of Mercy Temple, Penang, was photographed. One non-prescription slip and two illegible slips were excluded, leaving 103 prescriptions for practitioner-based analysis. Herb names were transcribed, standardised, interpreted with an experienced TCM practitioner and cross-checked against materia medica, pharmacopoeial and plant-name resources. Prescriptions were categorised into Formulary of Chinese Medicine categories, coded for safety/interpretation issues and mapped using BATMAN-TCM disease-domain enrichment (target score > = 0.84; adjusted p < 0.05). The workflow was designed for documentary standardisation and hypothesis generation rather than validation of clinical efficacy. The most frequent categories were Tonifying (16/103, 15.53%), Heat-clearing (15/103, 14.56%), Phlegm-resolving (10/103, 9.71%) and Dampness-eliminating (9/103, 8.74%). Several entries required correction or remained low-confidence because of handwritten, vernacular or multi-source names. Practitioner-coded cautions were dominated by cold-digestion, yin-deficiency/heat-dry, dampness/phlegm/stagnation, pregnancy/reproductive and toxic/mineral safety issues. BATMAN-TCM generated broad enrichment outputs for 101 prescriptions, mainly cardiovascular, pain/inflammatory and neurodegenerative/neurological domains. These outputs were treated as exploratory database signals, not clinical claims. This single-site corpus shows recognisable TCM formula logic, diaspora adaptation and safety-relevant uncertainties. The findings are hypothesis-generating only; they do not validate temple medicine generally or demonstrate efficacy for specific diseases. The protocol provides a reproducible basis for future multi-site, multi-practitioner, pharmacognostic and experimental research.