(China Daily)
Updated: 2007-12-19 07:23

The release of a report on the development of traditional medicines by the country's different ethnic groups is significant for efforts to preserve both these ingenious therapies and the cultures that produced them.

The document, jointly drafted and released by 11 central government departments, is meant to provide a framework for the preservation and development of medicines created by such ethnic groups as Tibetans, Mongolians, Uygurs, Zhuang and others.

The framework covers an extensive range of issues, including cataloging classic medical treatises, training medical workers in these traditional arts, recording medical practices by ethnic groups that do not have written materials and examining ways to improve the quality of traditional medicines.

China's indigenous medicines have proved effective in curing diseases in unique ways and have been in use for generations. The fact that more than 100 books on the medical practices of ethnic groups have been published in the past couple of decades reflects the richness of indigenous medicine.

Behind these medicines are cultures rooted in China's various, distinct regions. In this sense, the preservation of minority cultures is a prerequisite for protecting their medical traditions. Work on cultural and medical fronts will be self-reinforcing.

From the perspective of practical use, scientific research must be conducted to find out how these medicines work to treat particular diseases, whether modern applications can be found and how individual medicines can be combined.

To this end, the Ministry of Science and Technology has invested 30 million yuan ($4 million) this year in some key research projects involving these medicines.

Preserving medical practices that have no written records and have been handed down from masters to apprentices will be difficult. This is not only because efforts must be made to create written records using information from old doctors, but also because quite a number of such doctors have difficulty in finding apprentices.

It is hoped that the recently released report will spur efforts by different government departments and experts to better preserve these triumphs of indigenous culture and medicine.

(China Daily 12/19/2007 page10)