CHALLENGES IN THE REGULATION OF TRADITIONAL MEDICINE – A REVIEW OF GLOBAL SCENARIO

Abstract

Traditional medical knowledge and practices are widely prevalent around the world since centuries. With
rapidly increasing use of traditional medicine and complementary/alternative medicine (TM/CAM) throughout
the world its safety, efficacy and quality became major challenge and has made their regulation an urgent
need. The effort to regulate TM is a priority of all governments, which got greater impetus since WHO
Declaration of Alma-Ata in 1978. Though there are various guidelines and international consensus, countries
face difficulty in the development and implementation of the regulation due to its diversity and complexity.
Some literatures are available on global initiatives for regulation of TM and the challenges they are reviewed
in this paper with appropriate references. For the compilation and review of information, hand-searching of
books, journals, reports on traditional medicine and policy documents were done. Google, Pub Med and
Medline online searches were also carried out to access other relevant publications. The key words used to
access online materials mainly included traditional medicine, complementary/alternative medicine, folk
medicine, traditional healer, herbal medicine, health policy, economic policy, intellectual property rights.