The govt’s plan to certify India’s esoteric healers is a bad idea
The government’s proposal to certify practitioners of traditional medicine, those who do not have a medical qualification or standardised professional training but still seem to be effective at what they do, is a bad idea. The government would do well to abandon such a move. What it should do, instead, is try and understand the science behind esoteric practices that have no place in the standard medical practice taught in recognised medical colleges but are effective in the real world.
Research into such practices might help understand what makes them tick and thus make them safer for patients. This is important given how patients flock to traditional healers based on faith and word of mouth rather than on science despite the risk of harm, which typically goes unrecorded in the absence of a regulating entity. There is, indeed, considerable traditional knowledge spread out across India’s vast cultural geography that rural, and often urban, Indians have been drawing on to find remedies, including for emergencies such as snake bites and illness of many kinds.
There’s a famous family in Hyderabad that administers a preparation of live fish to patients of asthma, which has for decades drawn international media coverage. Rural India has traditionally lacked access to modern healthcare and relied on traditional medical practitioners. Such practitioners do not necessarily belong to any identifiable school of curative practice, such as ayurveda, unani or siddha.
There is a specialist institute in Bengaluru trying to unravel the science underlying ayurveda. Ayurveda works on a theory of balance among three humours—air, phlegm and bile—to keep the human body in good health. It treats disease for the imbalance detected by an
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