General Assembly Resolution #429 “Traditional Medicine” (Category: Health; Area of Effect: Research) shall be struck out and rendered null and void.
The General Assembly,
Understanding the important role that evidence-based medicine plays in maintaining the health of citizens across this Assembly’s many member states,
Recognizing traditional medicine’s value in making easy access to medicine readily available, allowing for more efficient responses to various illnesses and infections, especially when other medicines are not readily available,
Disappointed at the poor way in which the target resolution tries to regulate traditional medicine, exemplified by the following:
- The requirement that "traditional medicine" be tested by the World Assembly, if not member nations themselves, regardless of whether it would be harmful, or even fatal, to test subjects, violates the oldest founding principle of medicine, namely "do no harm." This is a different concern from whether such testing "would harm endangered species" or "violate the bodily autonomy of sapient beings," and is not a harm prevented by either exception.
- Cases where there is limited potential of harm for a patient, like ones where a form of traditional medicine is customarily employed for the general wellbeing of a patient, should not see the cannon of international law pointed at caregivers. There should be a minimum degree of difference between outcomes required before use of non-traditional medicine alongside traditional medicines becomes mandated.
- The vague definition of traditional medicine, which refers to “customary” and “provable prior use” as the main criteria to identify such forms of treatment, undermines the intent of the target resolution by incentivizing producers and sellers of traditional medicines to launder their products as novel, which would place them out of the resolution’s scope.
Intending to allow for the establishment of clearer and more effective guidelines around the usage and regulation of traditional forms of medicine,
Hereby repeals GA#429 “Traditional Medicine”.
