The Role of Traditional and Complementary Medicine Applications in the Protection of Health and Treatment of Disease During the COVID-19 Epidemic

Abstract

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19, a life-threatening disease, as a global public health problem on January 30, 2020, citing increasing cases and mortality rates in China and other international countries. The first case of the epidemic, which spread rapidly around the world, was detected in our country on March 11, 2020. At the beginning of the pandemic, efforts were made to find drugs and vaccines to prevent the spread of the virus and to treat the disease. However, until a coronavirus vaccine was found, all resources had to be used to overcome the pandemic crisis as soon as possible. For this, it was thought that complementary and traditional medicine methods based on scientific evidence may be useful to help patients with treatment practices and to minimize the disease and mortality rates until drugs and vaccines are developed. In this review, the use of complementary and traditional medicine methods used during the COVID-19 outbreak will be discussed in line with the literature.