A Comprehensive Information Resource on Traditional, Complementary, and Alternative Medicine: Toward an International Collaboration

Objectives: A prototype for a comprehensive information resource for traditional complementary and alternative medicine (TCAM) has been developed to fill the condiserable needs of a broad audience for worldwide access to TCAM information. The proposed resource is to be a comprehensive, vocabulary-controlled, integrated, standardized, multimedia information resource for TCAM. It will facilitate international cooperation, promote synergistic development of individual resources, promote dissemination of TCAM knowledge, and map the interrelationships among the TCAM traditions. Methods: We organized two workshops for representatives of international databases that contain significant information on various aspects of alternative medicine. For the first workshop, we prepared and demonstrated a prototype named Complementary and Alternative Medicine Digital Library (CAMed) to illustrate the anticipated structure, content, and functionality of the comprehensive resource. We then constructed a second prototype to d...