Introduction

A very warm welcome to all delegates of the Annual Symposium on Complementary Health Care. We are very pleased once again to deliver a full programme with an interesting mix of keynote lectures, discussions, platform and poster presentations.

This year’s symposium is preceded by a workshop addressing a key question in CAM: the future of CAM research and the directions that this should take. We aim to facilitate an interactive panel discussion and have invited panellists with sufficiently diverse viewpoints to make for interesting and stimulating debate. We expect a lively discussion of the key issues that are of interest to everybody involved in CAM.

We are delighted to be able to present to you two outstanding keynote speakers. Andrew Moore, Director of Research, Pain Research at Oxford University, Editor of Bandolier, and Honorary Professor in Health Sciences at the University of Wales at Swansea, UK, will give a lecture entitled ‘Complementary medicine – a game of two halves?’ Norman Farnsworth, Research Professor at the Department of Medicinal Chemistry and Pharmacognosy, and Director of the University of Illinois at Chicago/National Institutes of Health Center for Botanical Dietary Supplements Research, USA, has this year been elected by an independent panel to give the Varro Tyler Memorial Lecture, an annual series of lectures on herbal medicine sponsored by Dr Willmar Schwabe Pharmaceuticals, Germany. Gail Mahady, Assistant Professor at the College of Pharmacy and Director of the Clinical Pharmacognosy Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago, USA, and Assistant Professor at the Pan American Health Organization/World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Traditional Medicine will present the lecture on his behalf as he is unable to attend the Exeter symposium.

About 100 oral and poster presentations originating from 17 different countries will provide an overview of current research in the field of CAM. As always, a diversity of topics addressing an increasingly wide range of research questions is covered.

We wish you a pleasant stay in Exeter and hope you enjoy the scientific content and friendly atmosphere of the Exeter symposium.