WHO InternatIOnal Standard termInOlOgIeS On tradItIOnal medIcIne

WHO INTERNATIONAL STANDARD TERMINOLOGIES ON TRADITIONAL MEDICINE IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC REGION 3applications of TRM, primarily through studying contemporary publications. In view of the purposes of this document,which are for present day education, training, practice and research, and for information exchange, the technical termswere chiefly selected from recent publications.Number of proposed termsAchieving an international consensus on terminology is by no means an easy task. A step-by-step approach seems tobe most feasible; giving priority to commonly used technical terms. The number of commonly used terms in TRM isestimated to be more than 4000, most of which are included in this document.Source of the terms and selection process1. 1st Informal Consultation on Development of International Standard Terminologies on Traditional Medicine(20–21 October 2004)Given the need to standardize general traditional medicine terminology, the WHO Regional Office for theWestern Pacific convened in October 2004 the 1st Informal Consultation on Development of InternationalStandard Terminologies on Traditional Medicine, in Beijing, China. The main objective of the meeting wasto identify the willingness of Member States to develop an international standard for TRM terminology, toselect materials and references, and to decide working procedures to this end. During the meeting, it wasestablished that there is a need for standard TRM terminology. To expedite the process of term selection, theZhongyiyao Changyong Mingci Shuyu Yingyi ( 中 醫 藥 常 用 名 詞 述 語 英 譯 : English Translation of CommonTerms in Traditional Chinese Medicine: Xie Zhufan, China TCM Pub. Co., Beijing, 2004) was adopted byvoting through the main reference for the development of the international standard terminology. The lists ofthe temporary advisers and their presentations are shown in Annex 1.2. 2nd Informal Consultation on Development of International Standard Terminologies on Traditional Medicine(27–29 June 2005)In June 2005, the 2nd Informal Consultation on Development of International Standard Terminologies onTraditional Medicine was held in Tokyo, Japan. At this meeting, there were comprehensive and detaileddiscussions, after which the terms were selected.The selection of terms was made by following a step-by-step method:Step 1: Each expert reviewed a suite of suggested terms and voted on the terms forselection. The terms agreed by two countries out of three countries werebasically adopted.Step 2: Rationale for the selection of other terms were discussed and included whenso agreed.Also, there were discussions about the basic issues involved in English translation, i.e. whether translationshould be literal or free. The temporary advisers and their presentations relevant to standard terminology arelisted in Annex 2.The outcome of the 2nd Informal Consultation on Development of International Standard Terminologies onTraditional Medicine was that 4200 terms were selected for inclusion in the proposed international standardterminologies for the Western Pacific Region.