Traditional, Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Policy and Public Health Perspective

The exponential growth of global interest in (and use of) traditional, complementary and alternative medicine (TCAM) has led to the call for more evidence, its integration with modern healthcare services and comprehensive national health policies. This book addresses the public health issues in TCAM, providing a good review of TCAM in a range of priority public health areas. It contains 17 chapters divided into three parts, written by professionals and experts in the field of public health and TCAM research.

The first part of the book is a set of policy-related chapters that analyse trends across a set of policy issues such as regulation, education, safety and finance within the TCAM sector. Contributors to the nine chapters have reviewed policy trends in financing TCAM health-care services, research and development, as well as education and training of practitioners using selected case studies of TCAM projects from all over the world. This part of the book also covers issues on safety of traditional methodologies, national policies, regulation of herbal products and practitioners.

The five chapters of the second part focus on important public health issues in priority diseases and health conditions such as malaria and HIV, skin conditions and orthopaedic injury. Models, policies, non-governmental organisation programmes and other TCAM innovations were used to highlight fundamental principles of health planning, service developments and public health outcomes. A part of this section is also dedicated to the potential for partnerships between TCAM and modern healthcare approaches in combating HIV/AIDS and malaria.

The last part of this book discusses research methodology, ethical issues in research and intellectual property rights pertaining to TCAM. The chapter on clinical trial methodology talks about the complexities of evaluating medicinal plants in clinical studies, the different phases of drug development, trial designs, placebo, patient selection and ethical consideration in conducting clinical evaluations of herbal medicine.

Overall this book is very good at compiling important views concerning public health and policy dimensions of TCAM. It is a comprehensive and well researched overview of the potentials and challenges of this popular healthcare practice. The book provides good information on models and could serve as an important reference for policy-makers, programme developers and practitioners. My only concern is that the section about research in TCAM focused only on herbal medicine without any mention of research methodologies for other areas of TCAM. Overall I think this is a well written book which provides a global overview of the trends in policies and legislations and pharmacovigilance of TCAM.