In the largest ever gathering of Chinese and U.S. medical leaders, participants argued for greater international cooperation and a convergence of Western and Eastern medicine during a six-day conference hosted by the Harvard Medical School (HMS) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

With the goal of beginning “to consider common solutions to shared problems,” the conference drew more than 600 Chinese health care leaders and government officials as well as hundreds of American medical experts to MIT.

Nelson Y. Kiang, conference chair and HMS professor of physiology emeritus, characterized Harvard’s conservative medical institution as particularly “hostile” to complementary and alternative medicine (CAM)—practices not commonly taught at medical schools or widely available in U.S. hospitals but widely available and trusted in China.

Despite popular interest, only recently has the American medical establishment itself begun to study the benefits of CAM and its possible interactions with prescription medicine, speakers said.

In fact, speakers explained that Western medicine threatened the health of patients by not matching the increasing demand for CAM with greater study and education for doctors.

David M. Eisenberg ’76, director of the HMS Division for Research and Education in Complementary and Integrative Medicine Therapies, called for a “critical mass” of international medical talent to add intellectual momentum to validate CAM.

Eisenberg, who studied traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) while a medical exchange student in China in 1979, expressed great respect for TCM, and outlined the brief decade-old CAM movement in the U.S., contrasting it with the nearly 4,000-year-old history of TCM.

“TCM offers a different frame of reference for looking at the human body and allows us to deconstruct diseases through another lens,” Eisenberg said.