FOREIGN and local experts will attend an inaugural scientific congress on alternative medicine here next year, with topics as cutting edge as DNA profiling on the agenda.

The International Congress on Complementary and Alternative Medicine (Iccam) is to be the forum for discussions leading to raised standards in herbal medicine, and for scientific exchange between practitioners and researchers.

With the theme Herbal Medicines: Ancient Cures, Modern Science, it will accept papers reporting the results of scientific research into complementary and alternative medicine.

Besides DNA profiling, topics will include plant-based medicine, safety and regulatory issues and the chemistry of natural products.

The organisers are the NUS-Johns Hopkins Consortium for Botanical Drug Development, and the medicine and science faculties at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the National University Hospital.

They felt Singapore was a good venue as it was ‘right smack in between East and West’. Unlike South Korea or China, however, it had no herb-growing industry and so no vested interest.

Professor Ong Choon Nam of the NUS department of community, occupational and family medicine, is the scientific co-chairman of the Iccam 2005 organising committee.

He said that, in the last five years, there has been more interest in complementary and alternative medicine, which refers to various traditional therapies, whether used together with Western medicine or on their own.

Traditional Chinese medicine, such as acupuncture, is part of it.

It could offer answers to diseases that Western medicine cannot yet defeat, from the common cold and Alzheimer’s disease, suggested Professor Paul S. Lietman of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Medicine.

The event will be held from Feb 26 to 28 next year, at the Raffles City Convention Centre.