Status of Regulation on Traditional Medicine Formulations and Natural Products:whither is India?

The Indian traditional medicine (TM) has a rich heritage of science healing humans and animals. While so much attention is being paid to regulation of biomedicine (BM) practice and research, the same is desirable for TM too. The existing guidelines and regulations related to natural products/herbal formulations should be implemented to integrate BM and TM in a meaningful way for patient-centric treatment, as this would add to the Government's endeavour to improve public health. Registration of practitioners, setting up of statutory bodies controlling education, including prescription of standard texts and syllabus, pharmacopoeia, research, and related guidelines and Acts would serve as standards for evaluating the status of these systems in modern times.