AGE OF UNANI
Amit Varma of
India Uncut frequently gets galled at where he thinks our taxes are flowing. He often, and rightly so, disparages those government plans, schemes and policies which waste our hard-earned money.
In general, I agree that in our country, many of the plans that the government indulges in don't exactly utilise our money in an efficient manner. But that does not mean that the plans per se are misguided or flawed
The problem I have with some such posts by Amit, is that I get the impression that he tends to see things in black and white. Maybe he is criticising the government for not
handling the money properly, and he could be right. But I get the impression that he takes a simplistic approach towards the endeavours themselves, the value (or lack thereof) of which is not as easy to gauge as appears from his posts.
Consider his latest post (
"Your maid funds Unani") in which he is full of indignation about the crores that our finance minister has allocated to the "Department of Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homeopathy". Granted, that the use of our hard-working maid's money should be justified. Granted, the name is rib-tickling. But that does not mean the money is necessarily not warranted.
Modern medicine is increasingly turning towards traditional medicine and therapeutic approaches, not because of desperation but because of a confluence of ideas that its researchers increasingly see with these ancient practices. However, we have not paid the kind of focused attention that needs to be paid to say Ayurveda, that is necessary for identifying essential compounds or metabolites in Ayurvedic plants and turning them into effective drugs. The results are there for us to see- western scientists and doctors have rapidly appropriated many active compounds from traditional Indian medicines and culture. Turmeric powder's active ingredient (
Curcumin) has been now proven to be effective in inflammation and cancer therapy among other things. No one else but my own advisor and his colleagues already have patents on the use of curcumin to target proteins in the human body that are involved in cancer. Likewise,
Azadirachtin, one of the active constituents of the Neem tree has also been used in many modifications against disease. Many analogues of azadirachtin and curcumin are now in clinical trials.
However, we obviously cannot blame western scientists for taking advantage of our traditional therapies. It's a free market out there, and if we don't capitalise on our resources, somebody else will. Also, the aim is to fight disease in the end, and nobody cares where the resources come from. But at the same time, we are losing many possible new opportunities and sources of revenue because of our indifference to these therapies and compounds. A conference on curcumin that my advisor attended in Indonesia featured only one or two Indian researchers.
Needless to say, insufficient funding is surely one of the causes of the laxity in research in these fields. Naturally, if government does not fund these endeavours, companies will. But since when did the government start allowing companies an untramelled patent regime in our country? This is a government policy that we should definitely criticise, but in the short term, by any way possible, it is imperative that our researchers and doctors discover the hidden potential in our traditional therapies before we are trumped by others. As an aside, in this context, I am not putting Unani, Homeopathy, and Ayurveda on the same level. I have extreme reservations sometimes to the point of apathy about Homeopathy and Unani. But as a chemist, I see great promise for Ayurveda in a modern context, where personalised medicine, an age-old concept in Ayurveda, is being increasingly rediscovered by modern scientists within the framework of genomics.
Thus, we should welcome the fact that the government is significantly funding research in alternative medicine in our country. It can create employment, spike Indian medicinal chemistry upwards, and firmly secure our rights on what has been invented and practiced in our own country for thousands of years. Now, whether the government
will efficiently allocate this money or not is a totally different question, and I think there's a lot of reason to be pessimistic on this point. After all, Ayurvedic research can be stunning or can consist of complete quackery. But the allocation of money itself, if anything, should be seen as a possible breath of fresh air for such enterprises and for our development. I think our maid servant can feel validated about that (although it probably won't be easy to convince her since she mainly worries about getting her next meal)
Labels: ayurveda, government, neem, traditional medicine, turmeric
