By Eric Vandenbroeck and
co-workers 18 March 2020
India's PM Narendra
Modi's govt again
advises Ayurveda homeopathy for COVID-19.
Also earlier speaking
to
the Assam Assembly today a leading (BJP) party member announced that
"cow urine" (Gaumutra) and "cow
dung" (Gobar) can be used to treat the Covid-19
virus. "We all know cow dung is very helpful. Likewise, when cow urine is
sprayed, it purifies an area. I believe something similar could be done with
cow urine, cow dung to cure coronavirus."
Later, outside the
house, Haripriya said, "The world is looking up
to India to give the cure for coronavirus. India has discovered something or
the other. So, cow dung and urine can be used to get the cure. Cow dung and
urines are used in yagnas because there is something scientific about it."
As scientists race to
find a vaccine for the deadly Wuhan virus, the Indian government made the bold announcement
that their homeopathy and Ayurveda remedies hold the solution to the
Coronary Virus Epidemic.
Also Dr. Thanikasalam Veni who is
currently practicing at Rathna Siddha Hospital in
Chennai, and has 25 years of experience in the field of Siddha and Ayurvedic
medicines. In an
interview to ANI, he says that he has formulated a medicine made from an
extract of herbs, which can cure "any type of viral fever."
Similarly Chakrapani
Maharaj, president of Hindu Mahasabha, said
cow urine and cow dung can be used for treating novel coronavirus disease. He
also said that a special yagna ("sacrifice, devotion, worship,
offering") will be performed to "kill the novel coronavirus and end
its effects on the world."
"Consuming cow
urine and cow dung will stop the effect of infectious coronavirus. A person who
chants Om Namah Shivay and
applies cow dung on the body will be saved. A special yagna ritual will soon be
performed to kill coronavirus," said Chakrapani.
Hence while we
earlier have covered such subjects as Homeopathy
and Acupuncture we thought it a good time to
ad Ayurveda to this list.
While in the West
Ayurveda is often promoted by occultic and New Age organizations like the
Theosophical Society, in India, Ayurveda is developed via a much more serious Governmental body called AYUSH, an
acronym for Ayurveda, yoga, Unani, Siddha and homeopathy, all traditional
practices.
With Ayurveda's
efficacy disputed even in India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's critics
associate the Ayurveda
push with his Bharatiya
Janata Party's Hindu nationalist ideology. Whereby many of Ayurveda's most
prominent supporters have links with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu supremacist
organization.
The January 1948
assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by Nathuram Godse, a rightwing Hindu
nationalist who blamed Gandhi for capitulating to Muslim pressure and allowing
the partition of India to create Muslim-majority Pakistan, cast a long shadow
over the RSS, which was briefly banned and struggled for decades to regain
public legitimacy. But today, the debate is once again intensifying, as Prime
Minister Narendra Modi, a dedicated RSS activist
since his youth, won a second five-year mandate from India’s estimated 900
million eligible voters.
Already in an early
(1895) and widely acknowledged contribution to the ayurvedic revival movement, Bhagvat Sinh Jee,
the Maharaja of Gondal (a princely state in western
India), and later Vice-President of the Indian Medical Association, referring
to a "Vedic golden age" argued that:
All this unmistakably
proves that the Aryans were the most enlightened race in the dawn of
history….When the state of civilization was so perfect, and when all sorts of
useful sciences were regularly studied, there should be no wonder if the
science of Medicine too received its share of attention. This Science forms
part of the Vedas, and is called “Ayur Veda” or the
“Science of Life.” (Bhagvat Sinh
Jee. A Short History of Aryan Medical Science. Gondal: Shree Bhagvat Sinh Jee Electric Printing Press,
1927, First Published in 1895, pp.22- 23.)
In fact, another
aspect of Modi's ideology that I will not expand on any further here has to do
with the above-expressed view of a 'reverse' Aryan migration theory as among
others mentioned in Blood
nationalism: Why does Hindutva perceive a mortal danger from the Aryan
Migration Theory? A subject I myself earlier
covered here:
In the Global
life expectancy list for 2020, India ranks 165th. That suggests that the Government-sponsored
Ayurveda's “science of life” hasn’t done a very good job of keeping people
alive. But if the Indians see it differently and want to rely on Ayurveda
instead of on modern science-based medicine, one could argue it is their
funeral.
Of course, while much
of scientific analysis seems to be spurred by the public purpose of ‘the safety
of medicines being sold to them’, in countries like India they often where
meant, in the light of poverty and underdevelopment, to fulfill a public
purpose. Yet when the focus is on a population that is considered particularly
vulnerable, whether it be children, the elderly, the destitute or the
critically ill, public pressure for government and professional bodies to take
a more effective approach could be more urgent.
Elsewhere the
pluralistic East-West dialogue through the Western counterculture of the 1960s
and 1970s ultimately led to Deepak Chopra as the most prominent proponent of
Ayurveda. Yet as Dr. Suzanne Newcombe concluded also his “project is ultimately
grounded on faith” and “cannot be scientific” for more on this see.
Whose Ayurveda?
With such diverging
avenues like on one end Mind Body Spirit Fairs and New Age organizations like
the Theosophical Society in the West while in India, in contrast, we have a governmental
body like Narendra Modi's AYUSH it is clear
that what constitutes Ayurveda is much more complex than most people who hear
about it for the first time would think.
Thus the more
in-depth literature about the subject like among others R. Berger, Ayurveda
Made Modern, describes the re-invention of Ayurveda including its political
histories. Or Frederick M. Smith (Author, Editor), Dagmar Wujastyk
(Editor) Modern and Global Ayurveda: Pluralism and Paradigms detailing ‘New Age
Ayurveda’ and the ideological clashes between “classical” and “modernized”
Ayurveda, the “export” of Ayurvedic medical lore to Western countries, and the
possible “reimport” of its adapted and reinterpreted contents. And analyses
what is the non-homogenous nature of the Ayurvedic medical system.
Another good source
is Medical Marginality in South Asia: Situating Subaltern Therapeutics edited
by David Hardiman, Projit Bihari Mukharji
(2012).
Like Rachel as also Madhuri
Sharma and Matthew Wolfgram described how from a
historical perspective in India the British colonial thrust to replace
indigenous medicine with modern medicine mainly where public health was
treated, with a particular focus on Hindu pilgrimage sites and how this also
inspired local elites to invest in their own traditions, which saw an increase
in land allotments, sponsorship arrangements, and training institutions
developed to foster the indigenous medical traditions. At the same time,
Ayurveda's truth claims where epistemologically hybrid and socially contested.
Two ancient medical
compilations, "Charak Samhita" and "Susruta Samhita’"are
generally considered as the root sources of Ayurveda. Undoubtedly, after the
rudimentary senses of magical charms against diseases as prescribed in
‘Atharvaveda,’ these two compilations mark a forward-leap towards the
scientific development in medical science, in spite of having a strange and
confusing assemblage of science and its opposite.
However, while
lacking a theory that the British could recognize, a number of Ayurveda
apologists during the nationalism of the early 20th-century posited
“experience” as an epistemological alternative to scientific “rationality.”
The re-invention of Ayurveda in India
In this context, the
modern re-invention of Ayurveda in India came about when the asymmetrical
relationship between Ayurveda and colonial medicine was codified into text, and
Ayurveda apologists sought to regiment the two systems as parallel visions of
the body and its treatment. And where Ayurveda was described as an “alternative
science,” in which practitioners creatively draw upon India’s rich cultural
history to frame counter-hegemonic and uniquely Indian forms of modernity.
The above authors
also noticed by looking at the efforts made by the Ayurvedic practitioners to
carve out a space for themselves through various organizational and
institutional methods, that ‘traditions’ were invented and re-invented and the
classical system of Ayurveda was dramatically reshaped and redefined by the
Ayurvedic practitioners during the last 50-100 years and still ongoing. This
included the celebration of Dhanvantari Diwas; the establishment of the educational institutions
for ‘professional training’ of the Ayurvedic practitioners; the use of
platforms such as Kashi Nagari Pracharini Sabha; and,
the different Vaidya organizations of the provincial and national level for
propaganda, etc. are some of the issues explored.
To this came also the
commercialization of drug manufacturing in India. For example Sharma
(Indigenous and Western Medicine in Colonial India, 2012, p. 120) captures the
early twentieth century socio-cultural notions and sensibilities, as reflected
through advertisements. and also looked at the competition that prevailed in
the medical market and the consequent transformation of a traditional medical
practitioner into an entrepreneur.
The problematic situation today
Returning now to this
week's claim that Ayurveda remedies hold
the solution to the Coronary Virus Epidemic, a similar occurrence took
place during the AIDS epidemic when Maharishi Ayurveda made similar
claims.
The ideological
treatise of Maharishi Ayurveda came in 1989, in the form of Deepak Chopra’s
book Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine where Chopra
describes how the Maharishi has rediscovered the “true” Ayurveda, i.e., the
ability to cure patients through “nonmaterial” means. The essence of Ayurveda,
according to the Chopra, is this “nonmaterial” mind/body therapy, including
“sound therapy.” Whereby the book obfuscated the fact that the fundamental
assumptions of the Maharishi’s teaching are based in a spiritual insight rather
than scientific epistemology.
In 1991, a British
court case found two physicians guilty of "serious professional misconduct"
for use Maharishi Ayurveda in the unsuccessful treatment of HIV.
According to the
trial, belief must take second place to a form of knowledge validated by the
methodological procedures of empirical testing.
Nevertheless,
Ayurvedic doctors continue to claim that in the absence of any clinical
symptoms, they can accurately diagnose diabetes, cancer, musculoskeletal
disease, and asthma by merely taking a patient’s pulse but remain incapable of
providing evidence of a valid physiological mechanism for this capability.
Thus Ayurvedic
therapy is, to say, the least extremely thin on scientific verification. A
document prepared by the U.S. National Center for Complementary and Alternative
Medicine (a branch of the National Institutes for Health) states, “most
clinical trials of Ayurvedic approaches have been small, had problems with
research designs, lacked appropriate control groups, or had other issues that
affected how meaningful the results were.”
And for the above
claim being a "prophylactic
medicine", as the Indian ministry suggests, this miracle concoction
is, in reality, a super-diluted form of arsenic trioxide. Not only is the
compound known
to be fatal if improperly used, but there's also no evidence to suggest it
works on the coronavirus or any other condition for that matter.
We sci-checked the
evidence for Arsenicum album 30 for coronavirus
infections, the evidence for any other homeopathy drug against coronavirus, and
Arsenicum album 30 for any other infections.
1. Evidence for Arsenicum album 30 for coronavirus:
No studies were found
that researched the effect of Arsenicum album for
coronavirus in humans or animals (in vivo). Also, there were also no studies
found in an ex-vivo (outside the animal/human bodies) to study the drug
efficacy.
2.Evidence for any
homeopathy drug for coronavirus:
No studies were found
that linked the efficacy of any homeopathy drug in coronavirus infections
3. Evidence for Arsenicum album 30 for any infection:
Searching for
evidence in the homeopathic research for evidence for the drug Arsenicum album 30, only one paper was found, published in
British Homeopathic Journal (Kayne
& Rafferty, 1994), that studied its use in neonatal diarrhoea
in calves. This study was not only in animals on a different type of infection,
but was found to be statistically invalid by Verdier, Öhagen & Alenius in
2003.
Thus, Arsenicum album 30 has not been proven or researched
scientifically by homeopaths to cure coronavirus or any other infections in
humans.
As with other
homeopathic drugs, Arsenicum album 30 has never been
tested or proven to reduce coronavirus infections or to prevent coronavirus
infections. Even though the focus was to study the research conducted by the
homeopaths, no studies were found by non-homeopaths within the evidence-based
framework that suggests the use of Arsenicum album 30
for coronavirus.
Thus the claim of the
Indian AYUSH ministry and the AYUSH homeopaths is false, dangerous and can lead
to India’s own coronavirus epidemic, as the infected patients’ caregivers can
assume false protection based on the government of India’s advisory.
Kayne,
S., & Rafferty, A. (1994). The use of Arsenicum
album 30c to complement conventional treatment of neonatal diarrhoea
(‘scours’) in calves. British Homoeopathic Journal, 83(4), 202-204.
De Verdier,
K., Öhagen, P., & Alenius, S. (2003). No effect of a homeopathic preparation on neonatal
calf diarrhoea in a randomised
double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial. Acta Veterinaria
Scandinavica, 44(2), 97.
And if it weren't for
the Dalai Lama recently telling
his followers to chant a mantra as protection, India's purported tips to
fend off the coronavirus might be the least effective advice offered yet.
But with unverified
social media posts in India already advocating that AYUSH’s recommended treatments
a concern is that it will help bring out even more unproven Ayurvedic
remedies. As suggested above,
disciplines promoted by AYUSH and Ayurvedia tend to
be viewed by adherents as ancient secrets whose power baffles modern science,
so people following the advice given in the advisory bulletin might believe
they have gained some supernatural degree of resistance to the coronavirus.
In spite of the
overwhelming (just check google by typing in Ayurveda) popularity of Ayurveda
today, for many years already there have been warnings that among others, the
presence of metals in some Ayurvedic products furthermore makes them
potentially harmful. For example a study published in the August 27, 2008,
issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), demonstrated
that one-fifth
of U.S.-manufactured and Indian-manufactured Ayurvedic products bought on the
Internet contained detectable lead, mercury, or arsenic. Researchers found
25 Web sites selling Ayurvedic products. After identifying 673 products, they
randomly selected 230 for purchase. Of those, they received and analyzed 193
products. Nearly 21 percent were found to contain detectable levels of lead, mercury,
or arsenic.
In 2004, the Journal
of the American Medical Association (JAMA) reported that lead, mercury, and arsenic
intoxication were associated with the use of Ayurvedic herbal medicines.
The Indian Express
quotes Dr. Ajay Kumar, senior consultants and liver specialist at Delhi’s
Indraprastha Apollo Hospital, saying, “We
come across cases of metal toxicity where the underlying cause is longtime use
of Ayurvedic medicines.”
April 1998, edition
of The Lancet carries an article titled “Indian
Herbal Remedies Come Under Attack” by Sanjay Kumar, in which he states,
“Indian traditional medical systems, such as Ayurveda, have come under heavy
criticism for irrational and outdated practices.” And he goes on to quote
Vaidya Balendu Prakash, chair of the health ministry’s
Central Ayurvedic, Siddha, and Unani Drugs technical advisory board: “The
majority of Ayurvedic formulations available on the market are spurious,
adulterated, or misbranded.”
Thus adepts of
Ayurvedic therapies dance a hesitation waltz between science and superstition,
craving mainstream scientific status, and yet clinging to antiquated,
ineffective, and unprovable notions. Volumes of self-serving studies are
published every year, most concluding glowing positive results for Ayurvedic
nostrums. But credible randomized, placebo-controlled trials with clearly
positive outcomes for Ayurveda therapies remain non-existent.
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