PANJIM: The World Health Organisation (WHO) is mulling to set up a multi country regulatory co-operation platform for traditional medicine practitioners, which will accelerate the global acceptance and accessibility of Ayurveda within a period of 10 to 15 years of time.
“Prevention, early detection and rehabilitation to improve healthy life expectancy are among our priorities in future. Based on these, we have to understand how to utilise the nearly 5,00,000 registered practitioners of Ayurveda globally, to achieve these goals,” said Dr Geetha Krishnan, Technical Officer, Traditional Medicine, WHO, Geneva.
Dr Krishnan said WHO considers Ayurveda to be useful in several ways that will allow it to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030.
He was speaking at a session on ‘Expanding Scope of Ayurveda’ at the 9th edition of the World Ayurveda Congress (WAC) & Arogya Expo 2022.
Elaborating the activities of WHO to promote Ayurveda, he said the UN body has come out with training modules for Ayurveda, benchmarks for regulating its practices and a standardised terminology document that would help Ayurveda practitioners to interact with modern medicine in an easier manner.
“The WHO’s global centre of traditional medicine will work with several governments to bring out more evidence-based Ayurveda, to the globe. WHO is half-way through in the work to include Ayurveda in the international classification of diseases,” he informed.
Noting that Ayurveda is a cost-effective healthcare system for individuals and community, he said Ayurvedic concepts can be totally utilised for achieving the SDGs if these are considered under the perspective of products, practices and practitioners.
Commenting on the global status of Ayurveda, Dr Krishnan said that the rough estimates suggest that its global market is 30 billion dollar in 2022 and about 93 member states (MS) of WHO acknowledge the use of Ayurveda in their society. Further, 16 MS regulate Ayurveda practice and five MS support insurance coverage for Ayurveda.
