New Delhi: In a major boost to the traditional medicinal practice, the Government has decided to set up Ayush ICMR Centres for Advance Research in Integrative Health across all the AIIMS institutions in the country.

The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between Ministry of Ayush and Indian Council of Medical Research, in the presence of Union Minister of Ayush and Ports, Shipping & Waterways, Sarbananda Sonowal and Union Minister of Health & Family Welfare and Chemicals & Fertilizers, Dr Mansukh Mandaviya.

It will provide the framework to set up these centres aimed at building empirical evidence based medicine or medicinal practices from traditional medicine of India.
 
Speaking on the occasion, Union Minister Sarbananda Sonowal said, “This framework will provide avenues for our rich traditional medicinal systems to scale up along the scientific & empirical parameters. I believe with the setting up of these centres, we will continue to bolster our research capabilities healthcare delivery system and ultimately creating care solutions for a new, strong & healthy India.”

The MoU provides the framework for both the agencies to collaborate in identified areas of national importance for promoting high impact research to generate evidence utilising modern scientific methods. It also aims at exploring possibilities to work on public health research initiatives for addressing diseases of national importance.

The MoU further allows efforts to cooperate on conducting High Quality clinical trials jointly on identified areas/disease conditions of national importance with promising therapies of Ayush system to general evidence for wider acceptance. Steps will also be taken to develop & upgrade the Ayush department at the AIIMS into becoming full fledged Departments of Integrative Medicine with focus on academic research.

Union Minister of Health and Family Welfare Dr. Mansukh Mandaviya said, “Ayurveda is our age old knowledge system, our heritage. Modern medicine has today created a niche for itself. This MoU between both the systems will help traditional Knowledge to create a niche. Through this MoU, we will be able to further develop Ayurveda as evidence based science. This MoU will prove to be very important in enriching Ayush system of medicines.”

This MoU will also strengthen research capacity through training of Ayush researchers. It will facilitate looking at the possibility of inclusion of research on Integrative Medicine in the “National ethical guidelines for biomedical and health research involving human participants” by ICMR-DHR. Both parties have agreed to establish a joint working group to explore further areas of collaboration.

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