Europe
European governments have been actively involved in
putting in place the regulations needed to
guarantee the safety, quality and efficacy of the herbal medicines available in their countries. The
Traditional Herbal Medicinal Products Directive
(THMPD), adopted by the European Union in 2004,
made pharmaceutical registration mandatory for herbal medicines, with a view to prohibiting non-
authorized products from 2011 onwards. Since registration involves meeting a number of eligibility
criteria and technical procedures, as well as high costs, the Directive has led to a considerable
reduction in the number of herbal medicines available on the European market, thus restricting
local traditional health practitioners’ options for their patients. However, implementation of the
Directive is left to the discretion of the individual countries, which means that there are differences
from one to another, depending on the way herbal medicine is defined in national legislation.
With the exception of regulations covering herbal medicines, there is still no coherent, detailed set
of policies and legislation to regulate traditional medicine practices in Europe; this is especially the
case for traditional practices from other regions
of the world, for which usage is increasing steadily.
In most Western European countries, the practise
of traditional medicine by anyone who has not
been trained and licensed by a publicly-recognized instit
ution is either illegal (France, Luxembourg),
ignored by the legislation (Ireland, Malta, United Kingdom) or excluded as a possibility (see the
guidelines adopted by the Italian Medical Associati
on in 2009). Other countries such as Hungary,
Israel, Norway, Belgium, the Russian Federation and
Turkey have taken steps to put in place legal
instruments and clear rules governing practitioner training, the conditions in which these therapies
may be used, and to define the legal scope within which they may be practised
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