WHO GARD team meets with WHO Traditional Medicine team
Exploration of collaboration possibilities
Dr Nikolai Khaltaev of the Chronic Respiratory Diseases Team, that provides technical leadership and secretariat support to the Global Alliance against Chronic Respiratory Diseases (GARD), met with Dr Xiaorui Zhang, coordinator of the Traditional Medicine Team on 15 December 2006 to explore possibilities of collaboration.
The Alliance is interested in defining the role that traditional medicine could have in preventing and controlling chronic respiratory diseases. During this meeting, participants agreed upon that the initial step should be a search for existing evidence. A second step could be proposing a trial in allergic respiratory diseases, as a complementary intervention.
Traditional medicine attracts a spectrum of reactions, from uncritical enthusiasm to uninformed scepticism. The Alliance acknowledges the frequent use of traditional medicine worldwide, and wants to search for evidence to recommend this type of approach, but only when efficacy and tolerability are proven.