Reintegrating Indian traditional medicine into contemporary health governance: Historical disruptions and ecological linkages

Global health systems are increasingly challenged by rising interconnected crises, including chronic noncommunicable diseases, antimicrobial resistance, and biodiversity loss. These challenges expose the limitations of narrowly biomedical and sector-specific approaches to health and environmental governance. Traditional medical systems represent holistic, community-rooted knowledge systems that integrate preventive healthcare and medicinal biodiversity. Despite their continued relevance and widespread use, these systems remain marginal within formal health governance frameworks. This article argues that such marginalization is not merely the result of scientific inadequacy, but rather the outcome of historically contingent disruptions shaped by colonial epistemic displacement, industrialization, and legal–institutional transformations. Through a historical and systems-based analysis, the article traces the chronology and drivers of this divergence, including legal, scientific, and socio-cultural forces that weakened traditional healing systems while commodifying their knowledge. It further examines reintegration efforts through institutional mechanisms and collaboration, highlighting pathways to reconnect health, ecology, and livelihoods through evidence pluralism, debunking myths, and sustainable medicinal plant value chains. Further, drawing on “One Health and Planetary Health” frameworks, the paper proposes integrative pathways that combine the preventive, holistic strengths of traditional medicine with the diagnostic and regulatory capacities of conventional systems. In addition, it proposes pathways for mainstreaming traditional health care through a structured, system-oriented approach that integrates epistemic recognition, scientific rigor, and ecological responsibility within formal health governance. This scholarly work concludes that integration of both is essential for building a resilient, equitable, and sustainable healthcare system for the future.