One number does more work in this field than any other. You will see it on clinic websites, in supplement marketing and in news stories: 170 of the World Health Organization’s 194 member states regulate traditional medicine.
They do not. The source is a WHO news release of 25 March 2022, and what it says is that 170 of the 194 member states have reported the use of traditional medicine. Reporting that something is used in your country is not the same as having a law about it, and the release gives no figure at all for how many states regulate it.
That one substitution, use turned into regulation, is the most common error in this whole subject. It converts a survey response into a global legal consensus, and it gets repeated because the corrected version is less useful to the person quoting it.
What follows is a tour of the institutions that decide what counts as traditional medicine, read from their own documents: the agency that writes the global strategy, the classification system that gave these diagnoses codes, the treaty that governs who owns plant knowledge, and the patent case everyone gets wrong. Two of those documents contradict themselves, and this article reports the contradictions rather than tidying them away.
WHO’s numbers, each with its date
The March 2022 release carries three figures worth separating.
The first is that around 80 percent of the world’s population is estimated to use traditional medicine. Note the hedge, which is WHO’s own: it is an estimate, it is undated inside the release, and the release is more than four years old. Write it as what WHO estimated in 2022, not as a fact about today.
The second is the 170 of 194 figure, about reported use.
The third rarely gets quoted and is arguably the most interesting: some 40 percent of approved pharmaceutical products in use today derive from natural substances. That is a claim about the drug industry, not about traditional practice, and the two are routinely blurred.
Where the current strategy is concerned, the dates are clean. WHO published its Global traditional medicine strategy 2025-2034 on 30 October 2025, a 22-page document built on four objectives: strengthening evidence, ensuring safety and regulation, integrating this medicine into health systems, and getting value from it across sectors. The World Health Assembly adopted it as decision WHA78(14) at its seventh plenary meeting on 27 May 2025 under agenda item 13.8, requesting progress reports to the Assembly in 2030 and again in 2034.
Here is a finding that matters for anyone hunting the regulation count. The Executive Board document of 11 December 2024, EB156/16, carries the draft strategy text itself in its annex, and neither the covering report nor the annexed draft gives a member state count for use or regulation, or any population-use percentage. The board document says only that WHO surveys have shown widespread use and that more data are needed. The strategy’s own publication page carries no such figure either, and the final 22-page PDF could not be opened for this article. The famous numbers are in a press release.
A centre with two funding figures, both from WHO
In March 2022 WHO and the Government of India signed an agreement establishing a global traditional medicine centre at Jamnagar, in Gujarat, with an onsite launch set for 21 April 2022. The 2022 release says the centre is supported by an investment of USD 250 million from the Government of India.
On 31 July 2024 WHO published a release headlined with a different number: India commits 85 million US dollars to the centre, described as covering ten years from 2022 to 2032.
Both are WHO’s own published words about the same institution. The obvious reconciliation is that the larger figure covers India’s whole investment including the physical campus while the smaller is the direct contribution channelled through WHO, but WHO does not say that anywhere this article could find, and the 2024 headline presents 85 million as the commitment. Two authoritative statements, no reconciliation, and no basis for a writer to pick one.
The drift is not only financial. The 2022 release describes four main strategic areas for the centre. The 2024 release describes five inter-connected areas of work, a different list. The name moved too, from the WHO Global Centre for Traditional Medicine in 2022 to the WHO Global Traditional Medicine Centre in 2024.
None of this makes the centre fictional or the work unserious. It makes press releases a weak source for precise figures, which is a genuinely useful thing for a reader to internalize, because press releases are where almost every number in this field comes from.
The disease codes, and what WHO said they were not for
In 2019 WHO added a chapter on traditional medicine conditions to the eleventh revision of the International Classification of Diseases, the coding system hospitals and insurers worldwide use to record what they treated. Critics called it an endorsement. WHO’s own report to the Seventy-second World Health Assembly, document A72/29 of 4 April 2019, says something narrower.
The chapter is supplementary and for optional use. Its stated purpose is optional dual coding of traditional medicine diagnoses and patterns, which means a clinician records a conventional diagnosis and may add a traditional one alongside it. The report’s disclaimer about the entries runs to a single sentence: they neither refer to nor endorse any form of treatment. WHO’s own guidance on its classifications puts the same point positively, saying the chapter is “neither judging nor endorsing the scientific validity of any Traditional Medicine practice.”
That guidance also sets the scope. The chapter as released covers conditions that originated in ancient China and are now used in China, Japan, Korea and elsewhere, and WHO describes development of a second module drawn from Ayurveda and related diagnostic systems as having started. India’s Ministry of Ayush, in its own review of the decade, instead states that with the launch of that second module the morbidity codes of Ayurveda, Siddha and Unani were included. Those two official accounts describe different stages of the same work and this article leaves both standing. The guidance also notes the chapter is used only for morbidity data and not for recording causes of death.
The published criticism is real but thinner than its reputation. The most widely circulated English-language objection is a column by Christina Ung in the April 2019 Scientific American, which calls the inclusion “an egregious lapse in evidence-based thinking and practice.” It argues that listing these remedies next to clinically tested drugs implies a validation they have not earned, and that WHO should pull them from the classification until they are tested for purity, efficacy, dosage and safety. It also grants that cataloguing these practices and making health workers aware of them is worth doing. It is a magazine column citing its underlying studies at second hand, not a peer-reviewed analysis, and no peer-reviewed critique of the decision could be located for this article.
The two sides are also not arguing about the same proposition. WHO says the chapter is a counting instrument that endorses nothing. The critics say that classification confers legitimacy whatever the disclaimer says. Both can be true, and presenting it as a factual dispute would misdescribe it. It is a disagreement about what a code signals.
Who owns plant knowledge
The treaty that governs this is the Nagoya Protocol, adopted in Nagoya, Japan on 29 October 2010 and in force since 12 October 2014, sitting under the Convention on Biological Diversity. As listed in October 2026 it has 143 parties and 92 signatures, with Armenia the most recent to accede in September 2026. That is real growth: the same secretariat recorded 91 parties as of 5 December 2016.
The Convention’s own summary of what parties must do is the clearest short statement available. Where indigenous and local communities hold an established right to grant access to genetic resources, parties must take measures to ensure those communities’ prior informed consent. Parties must ensure fair and equitable benefit-sharing with them, keeping community laws and procedures as well as customary use and exchange in mind. Domestic rules must set clear procedures for consent and mutually agreed terms, provide a permit or equivalent when access is granted, and parties must monitor how genetic resources are used and cooperate where another party alleges a violation.
The United States is not a party to the Convention on Biological Diversity. The domestic record of Indigenous healing practices and American law is a separate article in this library, and that is where the US side of this question lives.
What the protocol does not do is settle ownership of a plant or a recipe. It sets procedural obligations about consent, agreed terms, permits and monitoring, and leaves the substance to national law and to negotiated agreements. That procedural character is why the famous disputes in this area were fought in patent offices rather than under the treaty, and the most famous of them is almost always described incorrectly.
The neem patent, which is wrong in three different ways
The standard telling runs: an American corporation patented neem, India fought back, and the patent was struck down. Pull the actual file and three of those four elements change.
The patent is EP0436257B1, titled as a method for controlling fungi on plants by the aid of a hydrophobic extracted neem oil. Its first claim is a method claim, not a product claim: controlling fungi by contacting them with a formulation containing 0.1 to 10 percent hydrophobic extracted neem oil that is substantially free of azadirachtin, 0.005 to 5.0 percent emulsifying surfactant and up to 99 percent water. Spraying, turf and the named diseases come from later claims, not from claim 1.
So the first correction: it was not a patent on neem. It was an agricultural fungicide claim on a particular processed oil fraction, and the claim specifically excluded azadirachtin, the compound neem is best known for.
The second correction: it was not about medicine. Nothing in the claims touches human or veterinary use.
The third correction is about who held it and who ended it. The original applicants were W.R. Grace and Company and the United States Department of Agriculture, so a US federal agency was a co-owner of the thing India is said to have reclaimed. Priority dates from 26 December 1989, the application was filed on 20 December 1990, and the patent was granted on 14 September 1994. An opposition took effect on 14 June 1995, and the opponent named in the European register is a Member of the European Parliament sitting with the Green group. A revocation entry appears on 7 February 2001, appeal proceedings ran into 2005, the revocation took effect on 8 March 2005, the appeal closed on 30 April 2005, and the register recorded the patent as revoked on 13 May 2005.
That is ten years of ordinary European patent opposition procedure, brought substantially by European politicians and campaigners, ending on patent-law grounds. It is a real and significant outcome. It is not the story usually told about it.
The companion case, the turmeric wound-healing patent, is cited just as confidently and this article will not repeat it. No primary document for it could be opened: not the patent file, not the reexamination certificate. Everything available was a summary of a summary. Given that the neem story turned out to be wrong in three particulars once the file was pulled, the responsible position on turmeric is to say the file has not been checked.
India’s own institutional answer to this problem is the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, run by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, which has transcribed more than 500,000 formulations and practices from Ayurveda, Siddha, Unani, Sowa Rigpa and Yoga into a searchable prior-art database, with access granted to seventeen patent offices including the European and US offices. The council’s own page claims that close to 370 patent applications worldwide have been rejected, set aside, withdrawn, amended or abandoned on the strength of that prior art. That is the council’s claim about the council’s programme, and the verb list is worth reading closely: amended and abandoned are not revoked.
Four countries, four different choices
Writers like to arrange national policy on a line from less integrated to more. The actual choices are not points on that line. They are structurally different decisions.
Japan abolished the practitioner and kept the pharmacopoeia. An 1874 law adopted the German medical model and ended recognition of traditional practitioners, after which the formulas were handed to physicians and manufacturers. Today 148 herbal formulas are covered by national health insurance and prescribed by doctors trained in Western medicine. There is no traditional-practitioner licence to hold.
India kept the practitioner and built a ministry. A dedicated government ministry, a statutory education commission created in 2020, and hundreds of colleges across six recognized systems. India’s own Comptroller and Auditor General supplies the counterweight, finding in one state audit that 451 of 587 nationally funded Ayush dispensaries had closed for want of medical officers.
The European Union regulated the bottle and left the practice alone. Its medicines agency states that the legislation does not regulate the practice of traditional medicine. What it does is register products: 1,719 traditional-use registrations granted between 2004 and the end of 2016.
The United States regulated neither. There is no federal licensure of practitioners in these traditions and no approval route their products pass through.
One more institutional lesson hides inside the European figures. The same 2017 agency report that gives 1,719 traditional-use registrations also gives two different totals for the other legal route, well-established use authorisations: 859 in two chart captions and 803 in a table of national totals, with both described as granted. The document does not reconcile them and its only relevant footnote accounts for three, not fifty-six. A careful article does not print a precise count for that category.
Sealed systems are a myth, and the traffic is current
The idea that each tradition developed in isolation is tidy and false, and the counter-evidence is specific.
Kampo originates in ancient China and was Japan’s main system for over 1,500 years before an imported German model displaced it in 1874. The European drug list drifted away from its first-century Greek core partly because medieval Arabic authors added ingredients of Asian origin to it, and again after 1492 with plants from the Americas. Unani still carries the Hippocratic and Galenic humoral framework that European medicine itself discarded.
The exchange is not only historical. Japan published an application guideline in 2007 for Western traditional herbal medicines sold as over-the-counter drugs, which is a regulatory category for Europe’s tradition inside Japan. Running the other way, the EU’s traditional-use registration scheme is explicitly open to products whose tradition developed outside Europe, and the European Medicines Agency’s herbal committee, in a questions-and-answers document reporting a 2008 European Commission report, names Ayurvedic medicine, traditional Chinese medicine, Kampo, Korean, Mongolian, Thai, Tibetan, Unani and Vietnamese medicines, with traditional African medicine added as a further example.
Two of those five examples are live regulatory categories, not history.
Terminology is an institutional argument
The words are not settled, and the disagreement is between institutions rather than between dictionaries.
The US National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health sorts these approaches three ways, turning on whether a non-mainstream method is used alongside conventional care, in place of it, or in a coordinated combination with it. What those three words mean for a patient is the subject of its own article here, and that article owns the consumer explanation. The institutional detail worth adding is the dating: the agency’s page carries content last updated in April 2021, and the usage figures on it, more than 30 percent of adults and about 12 percent of children, come from a 2012 survey. Read in 2026, those numbers are fourteen years old.
WHO does not use that three-way framework at all. Its 2025 strategy runs the words together as a single compound term, traditional, complementary and integrative medicine, and does not split complementary from alternative at all. European product law uses a third vocabulary entirely, sorting things into traditional herbal medicinal products and well-established use. India uses statutory system names. Four institutions, four taxonomies, applied to overlapping things.
What those words mean to a consumer, and how to tell a real integrative service from a marketing label, are each covered by their own article in this library. The institutional point here is narrower: when a source quotes a figure about traditional or complementary medicine, the figure was collected under one of these taxonomies, and which one changes what it counts.
How to read any number in this field
The practical skill this article is trying to hand over is small and repeatable. Four questions will defuse most of what circulates.
What exactly was counted? Reported use, regulation, registered products and licensed practitioners are four different things, and the 170 of 194 figure is the first of them.
What year? An estimate from 2022 and a survey from 2012 are both quoted in 2026 as if current.
Is the source the document or the press release? The strategy has no member state count. The press release does.
Does the organization say the thing being attributed to it? WHO publishing practice benchmarks, assigning a diagnostic code or hosting a research centre are acts of standard-setting and measurement. None of them is a statement that a treatment works, and WHO’s own classification disclaimer says so in one sentence.
Run those four questions on the claim that opened this article and it collapses in about eight seconds. That is the whole trick, and it works on almost every number in this field, including the ones in this article.
Keep exploring: Kampo medicine.
Sources
- World Health Organization. “WHO establishes the Global Centre for Traditional Medicine in India, news release, 25 March 2022 (around 80% of the world's population estimated to use traditional medicine; 170 of the 194 Member States have REPORTED THE USE of traditional medicine; some 40% of approved pharmaceutical products derive from natural substances; USD 250 million investment; four main strategic areas).” who.int
- World Health Organization. “India commits USD 85 million to WHO Global Traditional Medicine Centre, news release, 31 July 2024 (US$ 85 million over 10 years, 2022-2032; five inter-connected areas of work).” who.int
- World Health Organization. “Global traditional medicine strategy 2025-2034, published 30 October 2025, ISBN 978-92-4-011317-6, 22 pages (four objectives; publication overview carries no Member State count and no population-use percentage).” who.int
- World Health Assembly. “Decision WHA78(14), WHO traditional medicine strategy: 2025-2034, Seventy-eighth World Health Assembly, seventh plenary meeting, 27 May 2025, agenda item 13.8 (adoption and progress reports due to the Assembly in 2030 and 2034).” apps.who.int
- World Health Organization Executive Board. “Draft global traditional medicine strategy (2025-2034), EB156/16, 11 December 2024 (checked directly: contains no count of Member States that use or regulate traditional medicine and no population-use percentage).” apps.who.int
- World Health Organization. “Eleventh revision of the International Classification of Diseases, report by the Director-General, document A72/29, Seventy-second World Health Assembly, 4 April 2019, provisional agenda item 12.7, paragraph 41 (supplementary chapter for optional use; optional dual coding; the one-sentence disclaimer that the entries neither refer to nor endorse any form of treatment).” apps.who.int
- World Health Organization. “Frequently Asked Questions: Traditional Medicine (chapter scope limited to conditions originating in ancient China; a second module derived from Ayurveda and related diagnostic systems described as started; morbidity use only; the quoted statement that the chapter is neither judging nor endorsing scientific validity).” who.int
- Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity. “Parties to the Nagoya Protocol (143 Parties and 92 signatures as listed in October 2026; adopted 29 October 2010; entered into force 12 October 2014; Armenia acceded September 2026).” cbd.int
- Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity. “The Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit-sharing, factsheet (prior informed consent of indigenous and local communities; fair and equitable benefit-sharing; community laws, procedures and customary use and exchange; permits, monitoring and cooperation on alleged violations).” cbd.int
- Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity. “COP-13 press brief on the Nagoya Protocol (ratified by 91 Parties to the Convention as of 5 December 2016, used here for the growth comparison).” cbd.int
- European Patent Office register, via Google Patents. “EP0436257B1, Method for controlling fungi on plants by the aid of a hydrophobic extracted neem oil (applicants W.R. Grace and Co.-Conn. and the United States Department of Agriculture; priority 26 December 1989; filed 20 December 1990; granted 14 September 1994; opposition effective 14 June 1995; revocation entry 7 February 2001; revocation effective 8 March 2005; appeal closed 30 April 2005; recorded revoked 13 May 2005; claims read in full).” patents.google.com
- Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, Government of India. “Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (more than 5.0 lakh formulations and practices transcribed from Ayurveda, Siddha, Unani, Sowa Rigpa and Yoga; access for seventeen patent offices; CSIR's own claim about close to 370 patent applications rejected, set aside, withdrawn, amended or abandoned).” csir.res.in
- European Medicines Agency, Committee on Herbal Medicinal Products. “Uptake of the traditional use registration scheme and implementation of the provisions of Directive 2004/24/EC in EU Member States, EMA/HMPC/322570/2011 Rev. 7, 18 April 2017, status 31 December 2016 (1,719 traditional use registrations granted; well-established use totals of 859 in the Figure 2 and Figure 4 captions against 803 in the Table 2 total row, both described as granted).” ema.europa.eu
- European Medicines Agency, Committee on Herbal Medicinal Products. “Questions and Answers on the European Union framework for (traditional) herbal medicinal products, including those from a non-European tradition, EMA/HMPC/402684/2013 Rev. 1, 22 November 2023 (the legislation does not regulate the practice of traditional medicine; nine non-European traditions named).” ema.europa.eu
- National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, National Institutes of Health. “Complementary, Alternative, or Integrative Health: What's In a Name? (content Last Updated April 2021; the three-way distinction; usage figures of more than 30 percent of adults and about 12 percent of children drawn from a 2012 survey).” nccih.nih.gov
- Ung C.. “The World Health Organization Gives the Nod to Traditional Chinese Medicine. Bad Idea. Scientific American, Vol. 320 No. 4, April 2019 (a magazine column, cited as published criticism and labelled as such in the text).” scientificamerican.com
- Ministry of Ayush, Government of India. “Towards Holistic Health for All: A Decade of Transformative Growth in Ayush (the ministry's statement that with the launch of ICD-11 Module 2 the morbidity codes of Ayurveda, Siddha and Unani were included).” nih.ayush.gov.in
- Comptroller and Auditor General of India. “Chapter X, Functioning of AYUSH, Performance Audit on Public Health Infrastructure and Management of Health Services in Andhra Pradesh (451 of 587 national health mission Ayush dispensaries closed for want of medical officers since April 2017).”
- Moschik EC, Mercado C, Yoshino T, Matsuura K, Watanabe K.. “Usage and Attitudes of Physicians in Japan Concerning Traditional Japanese Medicine (Kampo Medicine). Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine, 2012. PubMed. DOI: 10.1155/2012/139818 (1874 Medical Care Law; insurance coverage from 1967; 148 formulas; over 1,500 years of prior primacy).” pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- De Vos P.. “European materia medica in historical texts: longevity of a tradition and implications for future use. Journal of Ethnopharmacology, 2010;132(1):28-47. PubMed. DOI: 10.1016/j.jep.2010.05.035 (Asian-origin simples added by medieval Arabian authors; American materia medica after 1492).” pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov