Abstract
Background/Objectives: Recently, international standardization has become a priority in the healthcare business, as the need to reduce variance of patient care under rapid increase of social security costs because of the aging population. The pace of globalization in the field of traditional medicine has surged since the establishment of a new Technical Committee (TC) as “TC249 Traditional Chinese Medicine (provisional)” at the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in 2009. The following paragraphs review the current situation of standardization of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) at the general meetings of in ISO/TC249.
Methods: The ISO/TC249 standards and standard projects on the ISO website were searched, and new standard proposals’ information was collected from the proceedings at the meetings of ISO/TC249.
Results: Six standards were published under the responsibility of ISO/TC249 (as of June 2016), such as (1) TCM-Ginseng seeds and seedlings-Part 1: Panax ginseng C.A.Meyer, (2) Sterile acupuncture needles for single use, (3) TCM-Determination of heavy metals in herbal medicines used in TCM, (4) TCMHerbal decoction apparatus, (5) TCM-General requirements of moxibustion devices, and (6) TCM-Coding system for Chinese medicines-Part 1:Coding rules for Chinese medicines. A rapid development of international standardization in TCM has been observed in ISO/TC249, although inadequacy in proposing a country’s domestic standards as the international standards without respect for the rules of laws or existing standards has been pointed out. Agreement was achieved that discussion of education standardization for students on TCM is beyond the scope of TC249.
Conclusions: This paper has briefly described the present status of international efforts to standardize traditional medicine.