International traditional Chinese medicine guideline for diagnostic and treatment principles of diabetes.

Diabetes mellitus (DM) was one of the most severe public health problems that affected nearly 463 million adults around the world. In addition to insulin and oral hypoglycemic agents, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) was an effective alternative therapy for diabetes and its complications, and it had been widely used in the Pan-Pacific region, especially in Southeast Asia, however, TCM lacked specialized standards of care for DM in the past, which limited the TCM clinical efficacy of diabetes. Since March 2017, the Endocrinology Committee of World Federation of Chinese Medicine Societies (WFCMS) had invited experts in diabetes, TCM, and international standard setting to work with TCM endocrinologists from the Guideline Development Committee to review the TCM clinical research evidence related to the prevention and treatment of diabetes over the previous 14 years. Over an 8-months careful revision, the international TCM guideline was finally developed under the guidance of review experts, physicians and surveyed patients, to provide standardized diagnosis and treatment advice of diabetes for global TCM doctors. This guideline clarified the TCM classification, staging, and syndromes of diabetes, gave the instructions that how to identified different stages and syndromes clearly, and accordingly recommended different TCM therapies based on the level of evidence. It's worth noting that when the guideline was being made, fewer high-quality clinical research evidence could be found, and very few researches were so outdated that need to be updated. More high-quality research evidence would be included in the updated version of guideline to continuously improve the overall level of global TCM in preventing and treating diabetes, and long-term clinical researches were advocated.