India as global center for traditional medicine: Needs, initiatives, and challenges

Abstract

Objective: The current COVID-19 pandemic has shoved all the treatment modalities to gear up and explore their preventive and therapeutic potentials. The current article aims to explore the needs, initiatives, and challenges for India as a setup of global center for traditional medicine (TM). Data Source: The article reflects the objectives through rigorous analysis of the World Health Organization (WHO) reports on traditional and complementary medicine (T and CM) and various other articles. Literature search was done on PubMed and Google Scholar using keywords “'traditional medicine,” “complementary medicine,” “alternative medicine,” “Ayurveda,” and these were used in different combinations. Review Methods: Analysis and synthesis from authentic literatures and other scholarly articles published from 2012 to 2021 are included to provide an overall impression of Traditional Medicine and its adoption in India and across the globe. Results: In India, AYUSH Ministry has demarche to fight the current pandemic in thegreatest possible way. The WHO is also constantly thriving with the contributing nations to amalgamate the primeval system of medicine with current universal health coverage globally. Conclusion: With the launch of Global Centre for TM in India, India has immense responsibility to take T and CM to international standard. To set a benchmark, it is necessary to pull out the ancient medical knowledge out of books and scriptures and combine it with the modern science and technology in a pragmatic fashion.

Keywords

• ayush
• covid-19
• global
• pandemic
• traditional and complementary medicine