**5. Conclusion**

Development of good empirical practices have been guiding ethical discussions and specifying a normative approach and framework for human research at the same time. CAM field necessitates evidence-based results on clinical research. Due to their approaches of preventing illnesses and providing treatment that have been preferred by many individuals, TM and CAM practices and research are expected to progress. Clinical research is essential in ensuring medical advances, and it establishes the bond between theory and practice in the field of medicine. In addition to determining effectiveness of a treatment, strength of the evidences on the medical application should be evaluated. The right path with CAM and TM clinical research and practices would include not to disacknowledge them, but to pave the way for the scientific research on the ones that have the potential to be beneficial and to bring the proven benefits to modern medicine. One challenge with these practices would be the fact that a considerable amount of CAM and TM data are not systematic and standardized, which have made them difficult to scientifically accept. In order to assist the international acceptance of CAM and TM data to pave the way for CAM and TM databases, meta-analyses and so on, good clinical practice guides being made specific to these areas is essential. For all human research, informed consent must be obtained from the voluntary participants. Throughout this process, it is imperative to show respect to participants' dignity, to omit forcing potential voluntary participants in any pecuniary and nonpecuniary way, to care on their confidentiality, and to pay utmost attention on privacy of their data. New treatment procedures and medications as results of clinical research are for public welfare, but the benefit of the voluntary participant must be prioritized.

When it comes to CAM and TM clinical research, a framework to their ethical evaluation is suggested herein. For clinical research on CAM and TM, legal arrangements are necessary regardless of geographical region, belief and cultural differences. Ethical committees for clinical practices and researches should be established specifically for CAM and TM research. In these committees, physicians from different fields of specialization who participated in clinical research conducted according to good clinical practices, physicians having expertise on CAM and TM, legal experts with specialization on medical law and patients' rights, pharmacology and pharmacognosy specialists, along with medical ethics and public health experts. Instructions should be prepared to cover how these committees to work and make decisions; number of members and their employment periods, duties and authorities in these committees; how the applications to these committees are to be done, and how the decisions are to be delivered to the researcher(s); within the legal framework of the countries that the ethical committees belong to.

**89**

**Author details**

Medicine and Ethics, Eskisehir, Turkey

provided the original work is properly cited.

\*Address all correspondence to: sayligil@ogu.edu.tr

Omur Sayligil

*Ethical Evaluation of Clinical Research on Complementary and Alternative Medicine*

Eskisehir Osmangazi University, Faculty of Medicine, Department of History of

© 2020 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.93094*

#### **Conflict of interest**

The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.

*Ethical Evaluation of Clinical Research on Complementary and Alternative Medicine DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.93094*
