Strategies for Developing China's Domestic Chinese Medicine
1. Registration and approval of Chinese medicines should be standardized, internationalized, and authoritative.
The home of Chinese medicine is China. China's regulatory body for Chinese medicine has the capacity to guide the development of Chinese-medicine products worldwide. It should move quickly to formulate registration-and-approval procedures and rules with the international authority of an FDA, to serve as a reference for the registration and approval of Chinese medicines in every country.
2. The registration and approval of Chinese medicine should be distinct from that of Western medicine.
Chinese medicine, with thousands of years of clinical use, is still treated the same as Western pharmaceutical preparations in domestic registration. Many experts have asked: "Why can we not adopt, for our long-used classical-formula preparations, a more relaxed, pragmatic registration approach with Chinese characteristics?"
3. Accelerate the modernization of Chinese medicine.
Modernizing Chinese medicine means more than adopting advanced production equipment and modernizing the hardware. It also means standardizing and normalizing process design, in-process quality control, and finished-product testing.
Excerpted from China Traditional Chinese Medicine News, February 8, 2001