World Health Organization holds first summit on traditional medicine – DW – 08/17/2023

Global Health Organization (from) started on Thursday (08.17.2023) in India its first summit of traditional medicine, warning that these alternative therapies based on natural products are effective only if they are based on scientific evidence. The two-day summit will be held in parallel with a meeting of health ministers from my country G20 in the Indian city of Gandhinagar.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared at the opening of the summit that the UN agency is “working to create data and evidence that will serve as a basis for policies, standards and regulations for the safe, profitable and fair use of traditional medicine”. The WHO chief said earlier that traditional medicines can mitigate “access gaps” in health care, but they will only have value if they are used “appropriately, effectively and above all safely, on the basis of scientific evidence”.

However, the agency has been widely criticized by netizens, who accuse it of providing scientific credence to pseudoscience by asking its followers if they have turned to treatments such as homeopathy or naturopathy. This type of “Physiotherapy” was highly questioned in Europe. Later, WHO indicated on social network X (such as Twitter) that it was aware of the “concerns” expressed by people and admitted that “they could have been expressed better.” [su] message”.

“We need to face a very important fact, which is that traditional medicines are used very widely,” Nobel Prize winner Harold Varmus, head of the WHO’s Scientific Council, said in a video message during the summit. “It is important to understand what ingredients are part of traditional medicines, and why they work in some cases […]And most importantly, we need to understand and identify which conventional medicines are not working.”

The summit, which is set to become an annual event, follows the inauguration of the World Health Organization’s Global Center for Traditional Medicine, in the same Indian state of Gujarat. The World Health Organization itself stated, on its Spanish page, when announcing the event that “traditional medicine has helped make revolutionary medical discoveries and remains very promising”.

lgc (dpa/who)