Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) education should be included in the local school curriculum to improve TCM education and research levels in tertiary education which could result in more local TCM professionals in the future, State Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine (SATCM) Director Wang Guoqiang said Tuesday.
Wang made the suggestion after attending the opening ceremony of a TCM forum, organised by the private Macau University of Science and Technology (MUST).
The two-day forum, in which about 100 academics from Macau, Hong Kong, Taiwan and the mainland, including 17 TCM college principals in the four regions, are taking part, discusses how TCM education and research can be integrated with Western medicine education and research and how this can help develop the TCM industry.
The forum is being held at the MUST campus in Taipa.
When asked how Macau could raise its TCM education and research standards, Wang said that Macau had not been training TCM professionals at tertiary level for a very long time, adding that Macau should raise the level of TCM education in tertiary institutions for the future development of the local TCM industry.
Wang suggested that Macau should also develop TCM in the long term by giving basic TCM lessons to primary and secondary schoolchildren to provide a better foundation if they later choose to study TCM at university.
Wang said that, for instance, in Beijing, there was a trial scheme in which primary school pupils are reading and reciting “TCM Three Character Classic”.
“The TCM Three Character Classic was compiled [for schools] in a district of Beijing, and [three characters in one sentence] made schoolchildren recite the text fluently,” Wang was quoted by The Macau Post Daily as saying, adding that through learning by rote the schoolchildren could gradually understand TCM and traditional Chinese culture.
The Three Character Classic is one of the nation’s classic texts.(macaunews)
