Strengthening Global Public Health through Traditional, Complementary and Integrative Medicine
Knowledge Diversity, Well-Being Societies and Planetary Health
Traditional, Complementary and Integrative Medicine (TCIM), as the World Health Organization (WHO) has termed this field of knowledge and practice, is a major resource for long-term health. Globally, TCIM has a long history and represents the primary or preferred health care for 80% of the world’s population. TCIM also offers a global resource for innovation to bring sustainability to healthcare systems. Access to safe, effective and culturally appropriate healthcare is a fundamental human right, which has been supported by research from around the world.
As the World Health Organization has affirmed in the 2023 Gujarat Declaration, fruit of the First WHO Global Summit on Traditional Medicine in India in 2023, TCIM is an important element of a strategy toward universal health coverage and the pursuit of health-related Sustainable Development Goals across nations. TCIM “promote[s] health and well-being of all members of our human family at all ages, and that of the planet that sustains us all”. The Declaration also echoes the WHO’s 2018 Declaration of Astana, the G20 New Delhi Leaders’ Declaration 2023, and the new ICD-11 Chapter on Traditional Medicine, in emphasizing the contributions of both TCIM knowledge systems and related practices to these goals.
To advance these aims, as the Gujarat Declaration affirms, a robust body of rigorous TCIM-related evidence is needed. Such evidence should be produced using “inclusive and multi-disciplinary research methods”. These methods involve both conventional methodologies and those that recognize the “complex, holistic and individualized” character of many TCIM approaches and their diverse affiliated “knowledges”, while remaining “culturally appropriate”.
