Bridging the two worlds: worldwide reflections on the 2024 Hong Kong SAR/PolyU Conference

“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.