004 Comments on Hyderabad fish medicine for asthma

INFO

Distribution time : June every year. Likely to take place this year also. Advent of Mrigasira karte. (Astronomically: Time when Sun is in conjunction with Betelguese in Orion Constellation.) India will be midway through the hot summer, land will be parched with heat and the environment is ready to receive rains. Who distributes : A family known as Bathini Gowd Brothers. They claim hereditary succession of 160 years. Hereditary tradition may be true. Type of Medicine : Some traditional powders loaded in a live murrel fish. The patients are made to swallow the fish and its contents. Three more doses are also administered with fifteen days interval. Government recognition/support : Government of India or the Government of Andhra Pradesh should not provide support. But it is taking place under the pretext of providing security. PriceFree. The price of the live fish is to be borne by the patient. Annual Controversy at hand Rationalists demand that the Bathini Gowd Brothers should disclose the contents of the medicines. Gowd Brothers refuse to divulge that it is a family tradition not to disclose. The sage who first gifted the medicine 160 years back, the family claims, imposed the condition of 'secrecy' about contents. The family apprehends that the medicine will lose its effectiveness, if the contents are revealed.

COMMENTS

*Many ayurvedic and siddha remedies come with this claim of secrecy. *There is danger of many ayurvedic medicines containing heavy metals like mercury. The Bathini Brothers should at least clearly clarify that their medicine does not contain heavy metals and sulphur. *Use of non-herbal components such as sea-salt, rock-salt should also be measured and disclosed. Names of herbs can probably be held as confidential. *Courts seem to adopt a stance of neutrality and tolerance. Rationalists want enforcement of a scientific approach. *The Government Forensic Labs. should collect sufficient number of random samples without giving prior notice to Messrs. Gowd Brothers. The samples need closer scrutiny for presence of heavy metals and harmful chemicals. *Swallowing a raw fish seems to be an orthogonal superrogatory appendage. The medicine should work whether swallowed with fish or not. Hence, this can probably be dispensed with. *Continuous harvesting of murrel fish and its larvae for selling at the Exhibition Grounds, Hyderabad, can harm the aquatic ecological balance of the rivers like Godavari and Krishna. *The Governments can probably permit some duty and tax concessions for the ingredients used in the medicines, as these are not being sold. *It is highly essential that the names, postal addresses, email addresses, mobile numbers, the year of commencement, present number of the visit, positive improvements and side effects observed since the last dose, of the patients are properly collected and recorded by the Central and State Government Medical Research Laboratories, so that proper clinical studies can be conducted with case sheets. This is important because there will be no use of patronising the distribution of the medicines over centuries without observing the results. Establishing a cause-and-effect relationship between the administration of the medicines and the amelioration of symptoms ( or the absence of the relationship) is necessary. We can use computer-aided quantitative methods.