Invasion of bio-moral recipes into India’s health care system

The Traditional health care system has evolved more for preventing the diseases than as a curative system. Since a proper understanding of the etiology of diseases in general and the anatomy, physiology and other functioning of a human system were not clearly understood in ancient times, the recipes of ancient faith based healing practices were hence more towards bio-moral aspects and disciplined life.

No one would deny or refuse the role and paramedical benefits of the bio-moral recipes of our ancient traditional healthcare practices. We must promote all those bio-moral recipes for health and well being of the present generation. In the name of promoting all those bio-moral recipes, we have converted them as part of medical science. The role of patriotism and obsession over ancient tradition has significantly fomented conversion of the traditional recipes as scientifically advanced and necessary medical dictum. Subsequently, these bio-moral recipes instead of remaining as part of medical science have become medical science itself and started to gain all privileges and respects of proven medical science.

The most painful and disgusting point is that instead of appropriating all such privileges given by the Government to develop the system scientifically and prove its merit and relevance, the people who enjoyed all such paraphernalia from the Government remain lazy, largely misused all the benefits, falsified the system, promoted pseudoscience and used the faith of people as citadel to defend their inefficiency and ignorance.

The government in a democracy is formed by political parties elected by people. The election victory is largely determined by who play better politics. Every political party has necessarily politicized our medical system as well. As a result, most of the political parties after forming the Government have been using the traditional system of healing practices as a toy to play with our health and wellbeing and never appear to have realized how promoting such unproven practices they were damaging our rural health care delivery system.

On one end we were offering the bio-moral recipes as a solution to our medical problems and at the other end, we were making our society to become not just victims of such faith-based system but also to remain faithful to such occultism, thus making people missionaries of the faith system.

After seeing the glitter of the ancient traditional bio-moral recipes promoted by the Government as medical science, several people who could not joins MBBS course finds refuge in such system just to learn the bitter truth that the system is packed with recipes and tenets which are not only unproven but also cannot be proven by the scientific methods. By the time the graduates from such faith-based system realize the above truth, they would have already lost at least 5 years. As a result, most of them were been forced to sing the same old carol praising the bio-moral recipes and its great science. Be a Roman in Rome.

Point of the debate is not about the usefulness of such bio-moral recipes but how we can promote such system as medical science and how we can allow the graduates from such system as doctors in the real sense. How can we promote the products of such faith-based system as drugs and can cure human diseases?

The controversy and heat generated over the scientific merit of Nilavembu kudineer for Dengue which was promoted aggressively by the Government of Tamil Nadu with the claim that Nilavembu kudineer promote immunity, prevent dengue and cure/treat proves only the above loud truth.

We do not know how many innocent people have restricted their treatment just with Nilavembu kudineer alone by believing the above claims are tested and proven scientific truths and have worsened the health and died.

Point to remember is that when we promote such bio-moral recipe as medical science and drugs, we also must consider its ill effects because a large number of people in our society are not even educated and are indeed gullible.

Questioning of the scientific community over the merit of the Traditional system of healing practice should not be treated as criticism or as an attempt to demean its merit. Anyone would ask the merit of how the products of AYUSH can be called drugs in true sense when the science of such products remain obscure and unexplainable even to the experts of own system.

The above question is extremely important because all such products (so-called drugs) are given to people not when they are healthy but when they are sick. When we give such unproven products to sick people, we indeed need to know whether such products would harm the patient and even if they do not harm, would such products offer any treatment value. Such question gain greater importance mainly because of the fact that best and the scientifically proven medical system is already available in our society.

The government must wake up and must see the truth of our traditional system that it is nothing but a bundle of lies and should not see it from political treasure or fortune.

India needs best health care system to address the growing medical challenges and bio-moral recipes for healthy living and wellness. The wellness specialist should not be given the status of doctor to treat diseases because such move can prove disastrous than the real disease itself.

Cross pathy should not be allowed because it not only kills the health care delivery system but also kills the efforts of the Government to promote AYUSH.

Hope the day is not far away, the Government would wake up to put a fence to AYUSH limiting its role as paramedical service. Otherwise, the graduates not only trespass the allopathic system (crosspathy) but also would inundate our rural health care delivery system from underneath.

Dr S Ranganathan