Accelerate Legislation, Open the Market
Experts Offer Plans for TCM Development
At a recent symposium on TCM development strategy held by the Institute of Basic Theory of the China Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine, well-known TCM specialists Lu Zhizheng, Zhou Chaofan, Yu Yingao, Cheng Zhaohuan, and others held that TCM development must accord with the realities of China and with TCM's own laws and characteristics. Legislation must be accelerated; the market must be opened.
The experts put forward six proposals to ensure the sustainable development of the TCM enterprise: speed TCM legislation to protect and develop Chinese medicine; relax restrictions and open the market — Western-medicine methods should not be used to manage Chinese medicine. In Japan, classical formulas need no clinical verification to be made into and sold as patent medicines — its policy is even looser than ours. Establish a sound paid-use system for TCM resources to ensure their reasonable development and raise their utilization rate. The teaching quality, direction, and approach of current higher TCM colleges fall short of what TCM development requires; investment and reform in TCM education must increase to train truly high-level TCM talent. Quickly construct an academic-evaluation system suited to TCM's own developmental laws — at present, focusing on objectifying the four diagnostic methods, standardizing the evaluation of research outcomes, regulating objective indicators of zheng (pattern), and building a quality-monitoring system for Chinese herbs. Establish an economic mechanism for TCM's sustainable development: at present, project tenders are the sole funding source for research institutes, and researchers cannot truly design and select projects from the standpoint of raising scholarship and efficacy — which inevitably restricts the deepening of academic work.
Excerpted from Health News, February 10, 2001