Bringing Together What Belongs Together: The Journal of Integrative and Complementary Medicine Is Now an Official Journal of the International Society for Traditional,Complementary & Integrative Medicine Research

“On November 22, 2003, delegates of the 10th Annual Symposium on Complementary Healthcare packed into the main lecture hall of the Royal College of Physicians in London to take a momentous step in the history of complementary medicine research.” ¹ With these words, Professor Marja Verhoef described the birth of the International Society for Complementary Medicine Research (ISCMR), of which she was to become the founding president. What took place almost exactly 20 years ago in cold, rainy London was nothing short of a revolution: the founding of the first international professional society of researchers working in the emerging scholarly field of traditional and complementary medicine. These scholars were committed to rigorously investigating the wide range of therapeutic approaches that fell outside of conventional biomedicine's boundaries—and to innovating new research approaches, where existing methods proved insufficient.

Since then, ISCMR has advanced rigorous scholarship, while promoting vital international knowledge exchange and collaboration among scholarly members from over 50 countries. ² Another key element of ISCMR's work, since 2006, has been to partner with local hosts to host an annual international research Congress—18 to date in 9 countries on 4 continents.

In 2020, ISCMR members voted to retain the ISCMR acronym but officially changed the society's name to the “International Society for Traditional, Complementary and Integrative Medicine Research,” to be more inclusive of the wide range of research approaches in this field. This move also echoed the World Health Organization's recent adoption of the term “traditional, complementary and integrative medicine” (TCIM) in its public-facing materials.

Today, ISCMR continues to be “an international and multidisciplinary scientific organization established to foster the development and dissemination of new knowledge regarding whole person healing and whole systems healthcare research, including all traditional, holistic, alternative, complementary, and integrative forms of medicine.” ² Further, the Society has recently expanded its membership beyond individual scholars and trainees to include partnerships with other research-focused organizations in the field.

In 2023, on the occasion of ISCMR's 20th anniversary, the Journal of Integrative and Complementary Medicine (JICM) and ISCMR have forged a partnership, with JICM becoming an official journal of ISCMR. ISCMR will contribute a column three times per year that will focus on new developments, research, and research methods in TCIM. JICM in turn will support ISCMR and its members to broaden the reach of groundbreaking TCIM scholarship. Both JICM and ISCMR welcome this important advancement, and look forward to many years of fruitful collaboration ahead.