In May 2026, BRICS nations — including India and China — doubled down on integrating unproven "traditional medicine" into national health systems. A scathing BMJ editorial says the World Health Organization's own roadmap for doing so is a case study in moving the goalposts.
The Bait and Switch
On paper, the WHO's Global Traditional Medicine Strategy 2025–2034 promises "universal access to safe, effective" traditional medicine, built on strengthened evidence and tighter safety regulation. In practice, the strategy's authors quietly carve out an exception: member states can fund and roll out complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) before the standard efficacy and safety data exist — substituting loosely defined "real world data" for randomized controlled trials.
The Human Cost, By the Numbers
This isn't an abstract policy quibble. The editorial's authors, including long-time QuackeryWatch reference point Timothy Caulfield, lay out a grim ledger of real-world harm tied directly to the products this strategy would further legitimize.
Documented Patient Harm
- United States: the share of drug-induced liver injuries traced to herbal products roughly tripled (7% to 20%) between 2004 and 2013; liver transplants tied to herbal supplements rose eightfold from 1995 to 2020.
- India: testing of 386 traditional products found over a third contained toxic botanicals, with 28% adulterated outright — and India's covid-era promotion of unvalidated remedies caused documented liver injury.
- China: traditional medicines now account for more than one-fifth of all drug-induced liver injury cases nationally.
- Oncology: a study of over two million US breast cancer patients found significantly reduced five-year survival among those using CAM alongside standard treatment.
Money, Politics, and Rudolf Steiner
The editorial doesn't shy away from naming interests. It points out that acceptance of CAM in places like China, India, and parts of Africa often owes more to nationalism and political branding than to clinical evidence — and notes, pointedly, that the WHO strategy itself was shaped in part by Rudolf Steiner's "anthroposophic medicine" and funded by governments with a direct economic stake in the CAM industry they're being asked to evaluate.
India's own Ayush budget — covering ayurveda, yoga, naturopathy, unani, siddha, and homeopathy — has grown fivefold since 2014 to more than $530 million a year, with no accompanying evidence of improved patient outcomes.
Answering the "Colonial Science" Argument
Anticipating the usual rebuttal, the authors take on the claim that demanding rigorous trials is itself a colonial imposition. Their answer is blunt: the randomized controlled trial isn't an instrument of oppression, it's simply the tool that tells effective treatments apart from ineffective ones — and they point to artemisinin, a traditional remedy that became a frontline malaria drug only once science, not deference to tradition, validated it.
The ethical response is not uncritical endorsement of CAM but to expand access only to interventions that withstand standard scientific scrutiny as effective and safe.
What the Editorial Recommends
The authors call for a genuinely evidence-first approach: mandatory efficacy and pharmacovigilance requirements with real adverse-event reporting; retraining the world's enormous existing CAM workforce toward proven primary-care basics like screening, vaccination, and maternal health; independent trial funding with a requirement to publish negative results; and a WHO knowledge library that documents harms alongside claimed benefits, with commercial conflicts of interest disclosed up front.
A global health body's job is to hold the line on evidence — not soften it to accommodate the political and commercial momentum behind a $359 billion industry. This editorial says plainly what patient-safety advocates have argued for decades: goodwill toward tradition is not a substitute for proof.
doi.org/10.1136/bmj-2026-100062