allocated to modern life-science courses such as biochemistry, microbiology,
anatomy, physiology and pharmacology, and the remaining half are devoted
to various TKM courses and clinical training. This curriculum is aimed at
least in part to ensure that the graduates of the TKM schools become able
to provide expertise as a TKM doctor along with a comprehensive knowl-
edge of traditional and modern medical sciences. This educational system
for TKM schools is apparently unique in Asian countries, and ultimately has
some advantages in the ability to treat patients jointly and effectively with
western doctors.
On the issue of the educational system, it is worth mentioning that Hong
Kong’s health authority benchmarked the TKM educational system when
establishing a higher traditional medical school, and made the decision to
adopt the Korean system a decade ago after surveying the Chinese, Japanese
and Vietnamese systems. For postgraduates, most TKM schools offer the
Masters (MS) and advanced degree (PhD) programmes.
Research organisations and recent achievements
Most research activities have been carried out at the university level. Kyung
Hee University’s College of Oriental Medicine and the East–West Medical
Research Institute have been recognised as among the leading institutions in
clinical and acupuncture research. The latter has been designated as one of
the WHO collaborating centres for traditional medicine in Korea for 10
years. One example of the innovative work being done in acupuncture
research is the result of the cooperation between Kyung Hee University and
the University of California (Davis): they revealed physiological brain
responses for the first time using brain functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI) as acupuncture therapy was being performed on human
acupoints.^3 In the field of herbal medicine research, the Natural Products
Research Institute, Seoul National University, which has been also desig-
nated as a WHO collaborating centre for traditional medicine, laid one of
the cornerstones by constructing a comprehensive database of traditional
herbal medicines that consists of several groups of information with more
than 12 000 herbal formulae. The database includes the chemical informa-
tion of ingredients along with three-dimensional images of chemical struc-
tures, taxonomy of component herbs, pharmacological and toxicological
information, and processing methods for some toxic herbal material. This
database provides services in Korean, Japanese and English under the name
TradiMed^4 through the internet.
One of the significant achievements made by a research group of the
Natural Products Research Institute, Seoul National University, was the
development of an English coding system for herbal formula titles.^5 More
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