Innovative development path of ethnomedicines: an overview of ethnomedicines in China

Abstract

In the long history of disease prevention and treatment, ancestral populations worldwide have gained knowledge and experiences in traditional medicines. For instance, ethnomedicines of Chinese ethnic minorities constitute an important part of traditional medicines. In our study, we firstly clarified the concept of ethnomedicines and the connotations of ethnopharmacology. The particularity of ethnomedicine research were then summed up, and the development profiles of the ethnomedicines of Chinese ethnic minorities were discussed by investigating the current status and existing problems. On this basis, we abstracted the innovative development path of ethnomedicines for the first time, which was found to follows:resource study → standardized development research → industrialization of the achievements and efforts for internationalization. We found that platform establishment and team training are keys to achieving innovative development. Hence, this study provided a basis for ethnomedicine development.

Keywords

traditional medicines / ethnomedicines / Chinese ethnic minorities / ethnopharmacology / research mode / innovative development path

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Yunnan Provincial Science and Technology Department for continuously supporting studies on ethnomedicines.

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Zhaoyun Zhu, Ting Wang, Dehuan Fu, Yali Gui, Jingkun Wang, and Tao Cui declare no conflicts of interest. This manuscript is a review article and does not involve a research protocol that requires approval of a relevant institutional review board or ethics committee.

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2016 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg