Policy · Global Health · Evidence Standards

WHO's Traditional Medicine Strategy: A Widening Evidence Gap

A group of physicians and a health law scholar argue the World Health Organization is promising scientific rigour while quietly lowering the bar for it.

Source: Philips CA, Caulfield T, de Jong C, Qi X, Narayan DC. "WHO's misguided push for complementary and alternative medicine." BMJ 2026;393:e100062 (Editorial, published 30 June 2026)

In May 2026, the BRICS economies — including India and China — committed to further collaboration on integrating traditional medicine into healthcare, at a meeting hosted by India's Ministry of Ayush (which covers ayurveda, yoga and naturopathy, unani, siddha, and homeopathy). This comes as the global CAM market is projected to reach $359 billion by 2032. In December 2025, a multilateral declaration endorsed the WHO's Global Traditional Medicine Strategy 2025-2034, which aims for "universal access to safe, effective" traditional medicine by strengthening evidence, tightening safety regulation, expanding the workforce, and building a global library of traditional knowledge.

The Core Contradiction

The editorial's central objection: despite the strategy's stated principle that evidence should come before integration, it actually permits member states to fund and roll out CAM before standard efficacy and safety data exist — something the authors call ethically and methodologically indefensible. The strategy also endorses observational and "real world data" study designs as more "appropriate" for CAM than randomized controlled trials, undercutting its own claim to scientific rigor. In a WHO survey cited in the piece, 95% of responding member states named a lack of research data as the key barrier to CAM integration — suggesting the evidence gap is already acknowledged internally even as policy moves ahead of it.

The Human Cost the Authors Cite

The editorial argues that herbal remedies are, globally, now a more common cause of liver failure requiring transplant or resulting in death than prescription drugs. In China, traditional medicines account for more than one-fifth of drug-induced liver injuries. Of 386 traditional products tested in India, more than a third contained toxic botanicals and 28% contained adulterants outright. India's promotion of unvalidated CAM treatments during COVID-19 is cited as a specific episode that led to liver injury. Separately, a study of more than two million U.S. breast cancer patients found significantly reduced five-year survival among those using CAM.

Politics, Not Just Science

The authors argue that acceptance of some CAM practices in certain countries — including some African nations, China, India, and Myanmar — owes as much to political motivation, nationalism, or decolonial movements as to evidence. They point out that the WHO strategy was shaped partly by Rudolf Steiner's "anthroposophic medicine," a philosophy without scientific grounding, and that it was funded by India and China, both of which have their own economic and political interests in promoting CAM domestically. As one data point, they note India's annual CAM budget has grown roughly fivefold since 2014, to more than $530 million, without corresponding evidence of improved patient outcomes.

On Colonization and "Epistemicide"

The editorial takes the decolonization argument seriously rather than dismissing it outright: it acknowledges that some CAM advocates correctly identify real power asymmetries stemming from historical colonization, and that "epistemicide" — colonizers' destruction and devaluing of traditional healthcare knowledge — is a legitimate historical concern. But the authors argue the randomized controlled trial itself is not a tool of colonial oppression; rather, it's the method that distinguishes what works from what doesn't, regardless of a treatment's origin. Their example: artemisinin, a traditional Chinese remedy, became a standard global malaria treatment specifically because it was subjected to rigorous scientific evaluation — not because tradition alone was deferred to.

What the Authors Recommend

• An honest CAM strategy should mandate efficacy testing and pharmacovigilance, including formal adverse-event reporting — mirroring what this site's CAM Dangers page documents as largely missing in the U.S. regulatory system too.
• WHO's planned global library of traditional knowledge should document harms alongside claimed benefits, and disclose commercial conflicts of interest.
• Existing CAM practitioner workforces worldwide should be retrained toward evidence-based primary care priorities — screening, vaccination, chronic disease identification, maternal health — rather than continued CAM delivery alone.
• Research funding should prioritize independent trials, with negative results published rather than left in a file drawer.
• WHO's public messaging should stay unambiguously aligned with scientific consensus, since mixed signals from a global health authority undermine its own credibility as a tool against misinformation.

The authors close by acknowledging that CAM remains the predominant healthcare option for billions of indigenous, rural, and underserved people worldwide — but argue this more likely reflects constrained access to evidence-based care than an informed preference for CAM itself. Their proposed ethical response isn't uncritical endorsement of traditional medicine, but expanding access only to the interventions that can withstand the same scientific scrutiny applied to any other treatment.