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India applauded for use of ayurveda, Unani

Nitish S Rele

The Indian government's recent decision to add 10 medicines based on the ayurveda and Unani systems to its national family welfare programme is a great idea, according to Jacob Matthew of www.holistic-online.com.

Among the ailments the medicines target are anaemia, oedema during pregnancy, problems after pregnancy like pain, uterine and abdominal complications, lactation-related problems, nutritional deficiencies and childhood diarrhoea.

The voluntary pilot programme will end in 2003. Ayurvedic medicines have been included in programmes in seven states and Unani medicines in programmes in four cities.

"This is definitely a step in the right direction," said Matthew, co-founder of the Ohio-based www.holistic-online.com.

"If we are telling Westerners and the rest of the world that our traditional herbs and ayurveda are good, we should be using them ourselves to maintain credibility," he said.

www.holistic-online.com provides information on mind-body and alternative therapies, herbs, nutrition and stress management. It also covers homeopathy, acupuncture, nutrition, vitamins, yoga and common remedies for ailments. The herbal section includes descriptions of the herbs' possible interactions with prescription drugs.

Matthew would like the Indian government to go one step further. "If we want the rest of the world to accept these herbs, we need to provide them with data from carefully controlled clinical trials to show the effectiveness of these medicines," he said.

Among his suggestions are steps by the government to evaluate these products along with their commonly prescribed modern medicines in a double blind population study. "This will give us the proof the rest of the world needs before they will start using these products," said Mathew.

He believes that not much credible information is available on the many valuable herbs of India. "We Indians tend to be very secretive, probably because of the deep-seated fear that someone else will benefit from the knowledge," said Matthew.

"Any credible information on our herbs comes from Europe and the USA where the researchers have done carefully controlled studies. The reason ayurveda is getting popular in the Western world today is mainly due to the books written by people like Deepak Chopra, Vasant Lal etc and Web sites such as holistic-online.com."

Matthew would also like to see an improvement in the quality of herbs. "The government acknowledges that Indian herbs are fetching less money in the world markets compared to those produced in China due to the lower quality of the products from India," he said. "We should tighten our quality control system to make sure that we use and export quality herbs."

Westerners weren't knowledgeable about acupuncture from China until a press reporter who accompanied President Nixon to China became ill and experienced it first-hand. "Several visits by experts to China followed, and then came clinical trials," said Matthew. "Now, most major hospitals in the US accept acupuncture as an effective technique for pain relief and for other applications. We can use this model for exposing our traditional medical practices."

Several clinical trials, funded by the National Institutes of Health, are on to study the effects of ayurveda. If and once its efficacy is shown, things should look up for this alternative form of treatment, said Matthew.

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