ICTAM XI

ICTAM XI

Eleventh International Congress of Traditional Asian Medicine

Efficacy, Evidence and Safety in the Practice of Asian Medicine

12–16 July 2027

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Conference theme

The WHO recently framed traditional medicine as a vital vehicle for delivering healthcare to billions of people, pointing to its potential as a vital way forward for improving public health. Traditional medicines now sit at the centre of urgent debates about public health, evidence and implementation. As Global health policy is shifting towards traditional medicine,  global markets are rapidly expanding in volume, in new forms of products, treatment, representation and research.

ICTAM XI asks how this direction shapes the way we approach scholarship and practice—what historical methods, new implications of contemporary practice come to the fore? As the push for evidence-base traditional medicine becomes a criterion for inclusion, we want to ask what becomes visible—and what may be lost—when living knowledge is translated into clinical, regulatory and evidentiary frameworks? What kinds of evidence count, or get counted, under what conditions, for whom? How are safety and efficacy understood in different medical communities? 

These questions span the gamut of historical, ethnographic, clinical, regulatory, and policy frameworks. By asking them together in IASTAM’s unique cross-disciplinary and trans-regional frame, we can develop a more refined vocabulary for understanding problems of the past, present and future.

For perspectives on the recent WHO Summit, listen to this podcast.

Singapore, at a Crossroads of medical exchange

The history of two millenia of medical exchange through Southeast Asia remains visible in Singapore’s botanical institutions, community gardens, heritage foodways, kitchens and clinics. At the city’s hawker centres, Peranakan, Malay, Chinese, Indian and Eurasian foodways bring the same exchange to the culinary table. Their medicinal logics—warming and cooling ingredients, tonic soups, herbal teas, and dietary practices shaped by season and constitution—are transmitted through kitchens as well as texts.

ICTAM XI treats these traditions as scholarship in their own right: heritage caterers, garden tours, heritage sponsors from the traditional medicine world, musical traditions from South China, Indonesia, South Asia and the Malay World. In doing so, the congress brings lived practice and contemporary heritage communities into dialogue with textual scholars and practitioners, WHO delegates and regional health ministers, data-miners and pharmacologists, and graduate students beginning new archival work.

Singapore is not just a venue, it is a living embodiment of cultures and traditions from across Asia which comprise the medicines at the heart of IASTAM.
Coherence Workshop. The clip begins at 0:22.

Medicine across Asia

An Ayurvedic practitioner taking a patient’s pulse
South Asia. An Ayurvedic medical practitioner taking the pulse, watercolour, c. 1825. Wellcome Collection, Public Domain Mark.
Illustration identifying acupuncture points on two figures
East Asia. Illustration identifying acupuncture points in bodily tracts, derived from Chinese medical illustrations. Wellcome Collection, CC BY 4.0.
Thai massage treatise showing a human figure and massage points
Southeast Asia. Thai massage treatise with illustrated massage points, nineteenth century. British Library; World Digital Library / Library of Congress.
Tibetan thangka of the Medicine Buddha
Himalayan medicine. Bhaishajyaguru, the Medicine Buddha, with Padmasambhava, eighteenth-century Tibetan thangka. Wellcome Collection, CC BY 4.0.
Open Malay manuscript written in Jawi, with a medical and practical diagram
Malay manuscript. Medical and practical diagram from manuscript Or 7650. Polyglot Asian Medicine.

Call for Papers

Read the full call for papers for session formats, themes, submission guidelines, expanded panels and practical workshops.

Read the full Call for Papers →

Conference enquiries: iastam.comms@gmail.com