Opinion Initiatives to resuscitate traditional medicine are welcome. There is need to iron out regulatory flaws

Inaugurating the WHO’s Global Centre for Traditional Medicine (GCTM) at Jamnagar in Gujarat on Tuesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi talked of the possibilities offered by therapeutic approaches that are different from the allopathic medicine system. Their emphasis on “holistic care” makes traditional medicine systems particularly potent in dealing with the challenges posed by modern lifestyle disorders like diabetes and obesity, he said. Conversations on medical pluralism — one of the stated objectives of the new medical centre — are welcome. They could pave the way for a healthcare ecosystem in which healing approaches based on diverse knowledge systems learn from, and complement, each other. For that to happen, however, there must be thorough stocktaking on why practitioners of different medical systems rarely see eye to eye today. This would involve clearing misapprehensions but also, and equally importantly, ironing out regulatory deficits.

According to WHO data, 65 to 70 per cent of people in India use traditional therapies at some stage in their lives. The turnover of the AYUSH (ayurveda, yoga and naturopathy, unani, siddha and homeopathy) industry has gone up six times in the past eight years. Paradoxically, however, there is a lot of misinformation about such cures and their practitioners are vilified at times. A part of the blame for this must be laid at the door of a section of practitioners who make unsubstantiated claims. During the pandemic, for instance, Baba Ramdev sought to exploit mass anxiety by making wildly inaccurate claims for the products manufactured by his Ayurvedic pharmacy, Patanjali Ayurved. The yoga guru disparaged the allopathic system as a “farce” and alleged that lakhs of people had died because of the faulty treatment by doctors practising this system of medicine. Reports of traditional medicine practitioners prescribing allopathic drugs and steroids are also common. At the same time, the grouse of such physicians, about being judged according to criteria designed primarily to ascertain the efficacy of allopathic medicines, deserves serious attention. The National Commission for Indian System of Medicine Act, 2020 does try to resolve this predicament — the act was amended in 2021. But accomplishing one of the major objectives of this law — “ensuring the availability of quality medical professionals of Indian systems of medicine and adoption of the latest research” — will take time.

Advertisement

A growing body of scholarly literature today documents the efforts of a section of traditional medicine practitioners to sync the practices of these systems with modern research protocols. Regulatory bodies and initiatives such as the GCTM would do well to rope in such professionals.