The inaugural summit on traditional medicine was initiated by the World Health Organisation on Thursday.
According to the international body, the primary objective of this summit is to gather empirical information and data that would facilitate the secure utilisation of traditional medicine practises.
The UN health agency stated that traditional medicines are a “first port of call for millions of people worldwide” and that the meetings in India that brought together policymakers and academics aimed to “mobilise political commitment and evidence-based action” towards them.
“WHO is working to build the evidence and data to inform policies, standards and regulations for the safe, cost-effective and equitable use of traditional medicine”, WHO Chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said as he opened the summit.
Traditional medicine could bridge healthcare “access gaps”, but was of value only if used “appropriately, effectively, and above all, safely based on the latest scientific evidence”, Tedros warned earlier.
However, after asking followers in a post if they had utilised a variety of treatments, including homoeopathy and naturopathy, the global health organisation came under fire from online opponents who said it was endorsing pseudoscience.
Later, the WHO acknowledged that its “message could have been better articulated” and acknowledged hearing the “concerns” in a post on the social media platform X.
In the Indian city of Gandhinagar, the two-day WHO Traditional Medicine Global Summit coincides with a gathering of G20 health ministers.
“We need to face a very important real-life fact that traditional medicines are very widely used,” Nobel laureate and chair of the WHO Science Council Harold Varmus told the summit via video link.
“It is important to understand what ingredients are actually in traditional medicines, why they work in some cases… and importantly, we need to understand and identify which traditional medicines don’t work”.
The summit, which is expected to become a yearly occurrence, comes in the wake of the Gujarat state of India’s creation of a WHO Global Centre for Traditional Medicine last year.
