The country’s Professors and Practitioners of Traditional Medicine Forum

A national Forum of the country’s professors and practitioners of traditional medicine was held in the holy city of Mashhad, with the objective of ‘traditional medicine investigation in the past ten years and delineating the horizon ahead, in ten years to come’.

As reported by WEBDA, this forum was held aligned with the policy of traditional medicine vice-presidency in order to benefit from collective wisdom and continuation of the forum’s sessions of veterans and executive managers.

According to this report, vice-president of Traditional Medicine of Ministry of Health and Medical Education, Dr. Mahmoud Khodadoust, insisted on the need for all the family of traditional medicine in the country to be sympathetic, unanimous and use all the potentials available.

Later, the participant members in the form of three work groups of education, research, health and treatment reviewed all the important challenges of traditional medicine and pharmacy together with strategies to overcome challenges.

As stated in this report, in this forum the following topics were discussed and reviewed: emphasis on the existing structure of traditional medicine and pharmacy education, necessity for the formation of supporting majors and training in interdisciplinary majors, establishment of national research institution of traditional and complementary medicine, the need for well- balanced expansion of departments and traditional medicine faculties, promotion of educational quality, university students’ tendency to applied and clinical education, creation of assistant degree and keeping the PhD degree for traditional medicine major and the need to enter an organized service of traditional medicine into the system of health and first aid.

Also the most important topics that were brought up in the three work groups were: facilitation of conditions and criteria for the establishment of the traditional medicine service centers, the need to benefit from general practitioners and paramedics’ capacities in presenting optimum services in clinics, gradual development of services in hospitals, the need to organize non-academic educations and clinical services related to traditional medicine, the necessity to prepare and communicate the formal traditional medicine pharmacopeia , insurance coverage of traditional medicine services, establishment of centers to present natural and traditional products, organizing the complementary medicine services, communication of research strategy, the necessity of traditional medicine departments and faculties to observe research priorities, preparation of standard curriculums and the importance of designing diagnostic and treatment equipment.