Regulate traditional medicine as medicine

Regulate traditional medicine as medicine

It is welcome that the Uttarakhand AYUSH ministry has promised to issue a show-cause notice to Patanjali Ayurved for marketing a cure for Covid, when all the licence it had issued had been for immunity boosters. Patanjali Ayurved, a company founded by Yoga populariser Ramdev and his associates, claims to have found a cure for Covid-19 and is advertising the drug as a sure-shot cure for the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. This helps focus attention on two vital subjects: effective treatment for Covid and separating wheat from chaff in the world of traditional medicine.

No drug should be advertised or sold as a cure for any disease, least of all Covid, until and unless it has proven its efficacy in standard drug trials and obtained approval from the relevant regulators. The larger issue raised by Patanjali’s purported cure is how to salvage the scientific and the efficacious in traditional systems of medicine from the sheer volume of stuff that simply seeks to take advantage of popular faith in tradition and poor regulation.

Whatever the degree of compatibility of Ayurveda’s basic premise of balance of humours with modern scientific understanding of disease as being caused by germs and their interaction with the body and its immune system, Ayurveda’s standard treatment protocols are based on empirical evidence of efficacy over centuries. It is the duty of policymakers to understand Ayurveda’s efficacy from the standpoint of modern science — to enrich both Ayurveda and modern medicine.

That calls for subjecting Ayurvedic products sold as medicine, rather than as supplements on par with, say, malted milk drinks, to the same rigours of tests and clinical trials as modern pharma products. Separate regulators for modern and traditional medicine make little sense.