With billions of people already using traditional medicines, the organization needs to explore how to integrate them into conventional healthcare and collaborate scientifically to understand their use more thoroughly, says Shyama Kuruvilla, WHO lead for the Global Centre for Traditional Medicine and the summit, who is based in Geneva, Switzerland
This is the important bit for me. A lot of people are already doing it, so it’s worth exploring why they are and how it could affect other treatments (ex. harmless placebo, harmful action, if it increases / decreases compliance with other treatments, mental health and mindset, etc.).
I’m hoping this may also help some of the people who tend to disregard western medicine as simply an arm of big pharma. If they can see an organization like WHO reaching out to traditional medicine, it may help them accept those sorts of organizations. One of the biggest problems with people like that is that so much of what they are afraid of, and complain about, are legitimate complaints, they’re just levied at the wrong groups, because they lump everything together, from their local PCP to Pfizer to the WHO. Maybe this can help a little bit.
“traditional medicine”
Oh boy.
look I’m fine with people researching whatever the hell they want. That’s how we learn new unexpected things. Just so long as it doesn’t come at the expense of further research on stuff fields proven to be effective
You know what we call “traditional” or “homeopathic” treatments that actually work?
Medicine.
Making a platform for con artists to grift on isn’t gonna help things
If the research standards are the same for everyone how is it a grift?
That’s how we learn new unexpected things. Just so long as it doesn’t come at the expense of further research on stuff
Yeah, as for the first bit, for sure; exploration and discoveries mostly lead to advancements in the field.
The second sentence is a bit harder to grasp, because stuff that already works usually doesn’t need much further research. Unless you have something specific in mind or it’s a new field like mrna vaccinations against cancer, for example.
Getting back to the article, I like this quote: " It does not at all mean being soft on science," says Kuruvilla. “It actually means being hard on traditional medicine and hard on science, to say, do we have the right methods to understand more complex phenomena in the right way?”
Ya that second bit there is mostly why I’m fine with it. I think people get triggered a bit when they hear terms like “tranditional” medicine
Yes.
It’s controversial when an international body purporting to represent science and medical progress for the world endorses sham medicine and quackery.
That’s controversial. And it should be. It would be like a green energy summit featuring coal companies as speakers.
I am curious to see how these clashes in viewpoints develop from a more international perspective. Traditional versus modern medicine, versus misinformation; ancient cultural rooted customs versus science and a billion dollar industry. Beliefsystems; placebo effect versus empirical data.
I hope we will have some positive cross-pollination.
Absolutely! We have so much to learn from traditional medicine. First, let’s find people suffering from hallucinations and drill holes in their heads! Then, let’s find sick people and seek to balance their humors using bloodletting.
I think regulatory and scientific advisory bodies should use science and evidence to endorse or condemn practices, not what’s traditional or not.
