Eric Brand

Over the past several years, the World Health Organization (WHO) has made a major effort to promote traditional medicine across the globe.  In particular, the WHO’s Western Pacific region has dedicated a significant amount of effort towards developing diagnostic codes that allow traditional medicine to be incorporated into the International Classification of Disease codes.  The WHO is currently developing the 11^th version of ICD codes (many countries already use ICD-10, though the U.S. still uses the older ICD-9 codes), and the inclusion of traditional medicine into the ICD-11 has the potential to open up significant doors for integration into the mainstream medical recordkeeping and billing systems.  This endeavor represents an important milestone for the global acceptance and integration of Chinese medicine, and the WHO efforts deserve our community’s full support.

A few years ago, the WHO Western Pacific region made history by bringing a wide range of scholars and clinical experts together to create harmonized standards in terminology, point location, and diagnostic codes.  Despite significant political, academic, and ideological hurdles, the WHO committees achieved consensus on a wide range of issues and they published two books based on their achievements.  A free PDF version of their “WHO International Standard Terminologies on Traditional Medicine in the Western Pacific Region” can be downloaded at this link.  Their “WHO Standard Acupuncture Point Locations in the Western Pacific Region” can be downloaded here.

Although the topic has been discussed for a number of years now, there has been a recent flurry of online activity in the wake of the WHO’s announcement of their International Classification of Traditional Medicine project (click here for the link to the press release).  A wide range of articles on the subject can be found at this link, and this link to the American Botanical Council provides a nice summary with the following quote from Ryan Abbott, a former member of WHO’s traditional medicine team:

“Inclusion in the WHO Family of International Classifications, a very conventional tool of mainstream medical care, would be a powerful endorsement of traditional medicine,” said Abbott.

Additional impacts of the ICTM, according to Abbott, might include greater insurance reimbursement for traditional providers and services and creating a more scientific approach to traditional medicine by having answers to such questions as how many patients have particular traditional diseases, which receive a certain therapy, what are their outcomes, etc. “It may also help generate data on drug-herb interactions, which is an area where data is sorely lacking,” he continued. “Better data in this area may help patients avoid adverse effects, and may also improve conventional reluctance on the part of physicians to combine [conventional pharmaceutical] drugs and herbs.”  (Read more in the American Botanical Council article here)

While our profession is not always known for its political unity, we should all stand together to support the WHO efforts towards developing international classification codes for traditional medicine.