Regulations and Policies for Herbal Medicine and Practitioners

The absence of any form of a globally recognized and standardized regulation and policy for the coordination of the earliest form of medical care continues to hamper the development of this ageless and invaluable medical practice – herbal or traditional medicine. Considering that the availability, value, exploitation, exploration, and exportation of herbal medicine keep growing, this may be the best time to promote the safety, quality, and quantity evaluation as well as efficacy of herbal medicine products, practices, and practitioners through globally recognized regulations and integration into mainstream medicine. Existing community, national, and regional guidelines can serve as foundation materials for global policymaking and regulatory parameters as this continues to be the backbone of the calls from the World Health Organization. The advantage of this approach is connected to the prevention of communities, countries, and regions in the Global South (where herbal medicine use is widespread) and elsewhere from perceiving herbal medicine regulations and policies as entirely foreign, colonial, and disconnected from current realities. However, formal structures and institutions would be required to address and understand the transdisciplinary nature, complexities, and epistemology needed to dissect the cultural, clinical, and accessibility nexus of herbal medicine policy and regulation dimensions. The direct benefits of herbal medicine regulations and policy includes an increase in coordination and One Health security while preventing misappropriation. Current loopholes in community-, regional, and national-based herbal medicine regulations and policies are encouraging quack approaches like indiscriminate and unstandardized harvesting and processing of plants with herbal medicine potentials for herbal medicine formulation as well as herbal medicine production, storage, and use in the management and treatment of diverse ailments. Therefore, unified regulations and policies would serve as a reform tool with allowance for regular updates. However, such regulations and policies would first have to overcome the challenges associated with the diverse number of plants used in herbal medicine, their phytochemical constituent, production systems, and utilization patterns.