Regional Strategy For Traditional Medicine In The Western Pacific

This strategy was prepared to guide national governments in the Western Pacific Region, WHO and other partners in the efforts to ensure the proper use of traditional medicine and its contribution to maintaining health and fighting diseases in the Region. It has identified strategic directions and actions which provide general principles and guidance for countries and areas to use in responding to the challenges which they may face with consideration of the unique situation in each country and area.

Beyond the MDGs and their 2015 deadline, the goal of universal health coverage (UHC) is of growing importance, with its core elements of better health outcomes, greater equity and improved financial protection. It is vital that countries' policy decisions be guided by the best available knowledge. In this context, WHO's role as a knowledge-based technical support agency is becoming more crucial. To support Western Pacific Member States' advance towards UHC, WHO has in recent years produced adaptable regional strategies for health system development. This innovative review of the six current regional health system strategies has assessed their usefulness to countries across the Region. This summary report outlines the main findings of the review as well as its objectives, methods, limitations, and implications for the future.

This two-volume publication sets out information on traditional, complementary and alternative medicines, revealing people's belief in and dependence on different traditional health systems around the world. The map volume provides a visual representation of topics including the popularity of herbal/traditional medicine, Ayurveda, Siddha, Unani, traditional Chinese medicine, homeopathy, acupuncture, chiropractic, osteopathy, bone-setting, spiritual therapies, and others; national legislation and traditional medicine policy; public financing; legal recognition of traditional medicine practitioners; education and professional regulation. The text volume covers developments in this diverse and expanding field of medicine in 23 countries across the world, as well as overviews of the status in each of the six WHO regions.

The use and practice of traditional, complementary and/or integrative medicine (TCIM) raises significant questions, poses many challenges and holds much potential for the broad fields of public health and health services research.This book brings together leading international researchers with backgrounds and expertise across broad multi-disciplinary sub-fields including health social science, biostatistics, clinical pharmacology, implementation science, health geography and health economics. Contributors draw upon their research and experience to explain and review core research and practice issues on TCIM and its future development.The book offers a rounded understanding of the current and future possibilities associated with the TCIM-public health and health services research interface and provides an essential overview of the broad evidence-base emerging in this area of research, policy and practice. Individual chapters employ specific case studies, featuring particular medicines/therapies, and focusing upon a number of health care settings and environments including general practice, community pharmacy, hospital specialisms as well as community-based private practice and self-care.

Traditional East Asian healthcare systems have moved rapidly from the fringes of healthcare systems in the West towards the centre over the past 50 years. This change of status for traditional medicines presents their practitioners with both opportunities and challenges as the focus shifts from one of opposition towards one of integration into biomedically dominated healthcare systems. Integrating East Asian Medicine into Contemporary Healthcare examines the opportunities and challenges of integrating East Asian medicine into Western healthcare systems from an interdisciplinary perspective. Volker Scheid and Hugh MacPherson bring together contributions from acknowledged experts from a number of different disciplines - including clinical researchers, Chinese Medicine practitioners, historians, medical anthropologists, experts in the social studies of science, technology and medicine - to examine and debate the impact of the evidence-based medicine movement on the ongoing modernization of East Asian medicines. The book considers the following questions: •What are the values, goals and ethics implicit within traditional East Asian medical practices? • What claims to effectiveness and safety are made by East Asian medical practices? •What is at stake in subjecting these medical practices to biomedical models of evaluation? • What constitutes best practice? How is it to be defined and measured? • What are the ideologies and politics behind the process of integration of East Asian medical practices into modern health care systems? • What can we learn from a variety of models of integration into contemporary healthcare?

Evidence-Based Validation of Herbal Medicines: Translational Research on Botanicals brings together current thinking and practice in the characterization and validation of natural products. The book describes different approaches and techniques for evaluating the quality, safety and efficacy of herbal medicine, particularly methods to assess their activity and understand compounds responsible and their probable underlying mechanisms of action. This book brings together the views, expertise and experiences of scientific experts in the field of medicinal plant research, hence it will be useful for researcher who want to know more about the natural lead with their validation and also useful to exploit traditional medicines. Includes state-of-the-art methods for detecting, isolating and performing structure elucidation by degradation and spectroscopic techniques Highlights the trends in validation and value addition of herbal medicine with different scientific approaches used in therapeutics Contains several all-new chapters on topics such as traditional-medicine-inspired drug development to treat emerging viral diseases, medicinal plants in antimicrobial resistance, TLC bio profiling, botanicals as medicinal foods, bioprospecting and bioassay-guided isolation of medicinal plants, immunomodulators from medicinal plants, and more

This report is structured in five parts: national framework for traditional and complementary medicine (T&CM); product regulation; practices and practitioners; the challenges faced by countries; and finally the country profiles. Apart from the section on practices and practitioners the report is consistent with the format of the report of the first global survey in order to provide a useful comparison. The section on practices and practitioners which covers providers education and health insurance is a new section incorporated to reflect the emerging trends in T&CM and to gather new information regarding these topics at a national level. All new information received has been incorporated into individual country profiles and data graphs. The report captures the three phases of progress made by Member States; that is before and after the first WHO Traditional Medicine Strategy (1999?2005) from the first global survey to the second global survey (2005?2012) and from the second survey to the most recent timeline (2012?2018).