NEW DELHI: The World Health Organisation opens a major conference on traditional medicine on Wednesday, arguing that new technologies, including artificial intelligence, can bring scientific scrutiny to centuries-old healing practices.

The meeting in New Delhi will examine how governments can regulate traditional medicine while using emerging scientific tools to validate safe and effective treatments.

The UN body hopes this push will help make ancestral practices more compatible with modern healthcare systems.

“Traditional medicine is not a thing of the past,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a video released ahead of the three-day conference.

“There is a growing demand for traditional medicine across countries, communities, and cultures.” Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his own message, said the summit would “intensify efforts to harness” the potential of traditional medicine.

Modi is a longtime advocate of yoga and traditional health practices and has backed the WHO Global Centre for Traditional Medicine, launched in 2022 in his home state of Gujarat.

Shyama Kurvilla, the head of the centre, said reliance on traditional remedies was “a global reality”, noting that 40-90 percent of populations in 90 percent of WHO member states used them.

“With half the world’s population lacking access to essential health services, traditional medicine is often the closest — or only care — available for many people,” she said in New Delhi.

‘Evidence-informed’

The UN agency defines traditional medicines as the accumulated knowledge, skills, and practices used over time to maintain health and prevent, diagnose, and treat physical and mental illness.

But many lack proven scientific value, while conservationists warn that demand for certain products drives trafficking in endangered wildlife, including tigers, rhinos, and pangolins.

“WHO’s role, therefore, is to help countries ensure that, as with any other medicine, traditional medicine is safe, evidence-informed, and equitably integrated in systems,” Kurvilla added.

Kurvilla, who studied at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and taught global health policy at Boston University, said that “40 percent or more of biomedical Western medicine, pharmaceuticals, derive from natural products”.

She cited aspirin, drawing on formulations using willow tree bark, contraceptive pills developed from yam plant roots, and child cancer treatments based on Madagascar’s rosy periwinkle flower.

The WHO also lists the development of the anti-malaria treatment artemisinin as drawing on ancient Chinese medicine texts.

‘Frontier science’

“It’s a huge, huge opportunity — and industry has realised this,” Kurvilla.

Rapid technological advancements, including artificial intelligence, have pushed research to a “transformative moment” to apply scientific rigour to traditional remedies.

The WHO will also launch what it calls the world’s largest digital repository of research on the subject — a library of 1.6 million scientific records intended to strengthen evidence and improve knowledge-sharing.

Published in Dawn, December 18th, 2025