More than 500 traditional Chinese medicine practitioners from all over China issued a statement expressing their firm support for updating their field at a meeting in Guangzhou on Saturday.

A special center was also set up to research traditional Chinese medicine on the sidelines of the meeting the same day.
Xinhua News Agency reports the experts vowed to use science to boost the development of traditional medicine and to foster protection for intellectual property rights. But they objected to changing traditional Chinese medicine to conform with the practices of western medicine.

The meeting was held as voices around China called on people to stop seeing traditional Chinese medicine practitioners for treatment.

A traditional Chinese medicine professor from Zhejiang University, Li Lianda, said a lack of creativity and unsound research practices are hampering the developing of the field.

Li Lianda is also a professor at the China Academy of Engineering. He said traditional Chinese medicine is still kept off the main international health markets, even though it has helped to cure people in more than 100 countries.

He said around half of the people in China prefer traditional Chinese medicine to western medicine.

Editor: Yan