Introduction

Physical therapy for COVID-19 care

APEC Project of Integrative Medicine and COVID-19 Care

The background of the project

The COVID -19 pandemic has had huge impacts on people’s lives and healthcare systems. Over 6.5 million people have lost their lives to COVID-19 worldwide. Many COVID-19 patients suffered long-term physical and psychological symptoms caused by different variants of SARS-COV-2. In addition to developing vaccines and potential drugs, finding more comprehensive ways to efficiently combat this unprecedented health crisis is extremely important and urgent.

Integrative Medicine (IM) covers a broad range of systems and practices, including nutrition and supplements, mind-body practices, exercises, lifestyle adjustments, herbal medicine, and acupuncture/acupressure in combination with traditional medicine. Such approaches have been adopted as an attempt to improve patient outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many APEC economies have shown strong interests in potential IM approaches, procedures, and tools to combat COVID-19 and other infectious diseases, as well as to improve healthcare in general.

This APEC’s IM and COVID-19 Care project is to demonstrate how IM can help build better, more effective, and more efficient healthcare systems for countering COVID-19 and related diseases. Both developed and developing economies in APEC will come together to share and learn about current science-based medical practices for preventing, coping with, and treating COVID-19. Special focuses will be given to areas such as comprehensive care, efficiency, safety, feasibility, deliverability, and cost-saving.

The objectives of the project

  1. to conduct extensive basic research for developing a preliminary document, Recommendations and Guidelines on IM for COVID-19 Care;
  2. to host an APEC virtual workshop on IM and COVID-19 Care on September 20-22, 2022, and
  3. to systematically review and incorporate the workshop outcomes into the Recommendations and Guidelines on IM for COVID-19 Care in the form of a publication.

We welcome your participation in the workshop, and we look forward to learning about your views on IM for COVID-19 care.

If you have any questions, please contact: libinj@nih.gov.

Thank you!

Project Organization Committee