Dr. Nafiseh Hosseini Yekta
Director General, Office of Persian and Complementary Medicine at Ministry of Health and Medical Education, Iran.
Benefiting from the capacity of traditional and complementary medicine has always been interested by different societies and has been prevalent among people in different ways. In the last decade, the rational and enlightened use of different traditional medical schools in different countries has been the focus of health policy makers. The World Health Organization has issued a detailed strategy in this regard for the member countries and mentioned that the main approach to the maximum and optimal use of this capacity is to integrate it into all aspects of the health system. In this regard, every year, based on the WHO report, the number of countries that are in the direction of legalizing and developing education, research, and services in this field are increased. Among them, there are some countries such as China and India that have their own traditional medicine systems in their countries and started this approach many years ago and have extensive experiences. On the other hand, in many other countries, the rate of benefiting from this capacity has accelerated with serious planning in order to receive its positive effects on various social, economic, cultural components and especially the improvement of society's health.
In this regard, Iran, having Persian medicine, which is one of the oldest schools of traditional and complementary medicine, also has numerous national upstream official documents in order to use this unique capacity and valuable experiences in the development of education, research, products, and services. The transfer of experiences between active countries in this field at the world level can cause synergy and pave the way to benefit from it.
For this purpose, the International Symposium on Policy, Legal, and Regulatory Landscape on Traditional and Complementary Medicine, which is organized by the Office of Persian and Complementary Medicine of the Ministry of Health and Medical Education of the Islamic Republic of Iran, can be a turning point in this direction. It is hoped that the achievements of this symposium will be used by decision and policy makers of the health system.