[Re: https://www.hifa.org/dgroups-rss/world-conference-traditional-medicine-2026 ]
According to Neil, "The news item says the conference aims to 'integrate' traditional and complementary medicine into healthcare systems. But some of us would argue that the first priority is to demonstrate which treatments are both safe and effective, with a view to integration specifically of those treatments."
That is of course true of all medical treatments, whether they are from the traditional system or not. I think that "some of us" shouldn't pick out traditional medicines as being the first cause of anxiety regarding safety and efficacy when we see the damage being caused by rampant over-prescription of antibiotics, weight-loss drugs, psychoactive wonders, useless vitamins, etc, etc!
Chris Zielinski
Centre for Global Health, University of Winchester, UK
Past President and Board Member, World Association of Medical Editors (WAME)
Blogs; http://ziggytheblue.wordpress.com and http://ziggytheblue.tumblr.com
Publications: http://www.researchgate.net and https://winchester.academia.edu/ChrisZielinski/
HIFA profile: Chris Zielinski: Chris is a Visiting Fellow at the University of Winchester and Past President of the World Association of Medical Editors. Chris has held senior positions in publishing and knowledge management at WHO, where he served on WHO’s Ethical Review Committee and originated the African Health Observatory. During his time as Chief Executive of the UK Authors Licensing and Collecting Society, Chris was a director of the UK Copyright Licensing Agency, Educational Recording Agency, and International Association of Audiovisual Writers and Directors. Earlier, he founded ExtraMED to publish developing country medical journals on CD-ROM. Recent activities include papers on AI, and acting as lead author of the WAME guidelines (https://wame.org/page3.php?id=106). A major project has been to encourage hundreds of journals worldwide to publish editorials on nuclear risk and climate change (https://www.ifipnews.org/the-multi-journal-editorial-project/). chris AT chriszielinski.com. His publications are at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Chris-Zielinski and his blog is http://ziggytheblue.wordrpress.com