Understanding validation of traditional approaches to health: An analysis of research trends and the need for minimum standards- A systematic review

Abstract

Scientific validation of the interventions used for the treatment of various ailments in Ayush systems of medicine (ASM) is currently an emerging field. The stakeholders hesitate to promote the traditional knowledge to resolve the current health issues without exploring the scientific rationale and rigorous experimentation. It seems that scientific validation of traditional approaches has become a roadblock for the translation of the aged old experiences and wisdom into clinical practice. This systematic review has been done to study the evolving research trends, existing policy, current regulatory mechanism and publication criteria for the research meant for scientific validation of ASM. This review is based on the analysis of the published clinical trials, ethical and regulatory guidelines published between 2001 and 2022. The major databases were searched such as Medline, AYUSH Research Portal, Google Scholar, Scopus, Science Direct and Web of Science. The analysis showed that the trends for scientific validation studies had continuously been on the rise in the past two decades. The guidelines for validation studies, safety studies, good clinical practices and ethical guidelines for biomedical research had been framed for research in ASM. We observed that there were no defined minimum standards for an intervention to be declared scientifically validated so that the research could be directional. Our study concludes that the concept of scientific validation of traditional approaches has not been comprehensively defined so far. As a result, scientific validation studies are not conducted in such a direction leading to achieve the set targets in the near future.