Naturopathy craze: More like a craze for freebies; this stall promises free check-ups for all comers

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2005
Pragati Maidan, New Delhi, 4.30 p.m.

Indians of a certain age, and of a certain provenance (those from Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, for instance), love to complain about their ailments, real and imagined. Most conversations revolving around this tend to end with at least one individual in the gathering proffering the coordinates of a homoeopath, naturopath, or practitioner of ayurveda, siddha, or unani-essentially someone who follows anything but allopathy-who routinely effects miracle-cures. Now, I have an open mind when it comes to most things, but I must admit that it was with a certain amount of trepidation that I ventured into Arogya, an alternative medicine system fair that opened in Delhi's Pragati Maidan, a popular destination for industrial fairs, recently.

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The first thing that strikes me is that there is enough alternativeness on display at the fair: an ayurvedic vaid (doctor) at a stall put up by Dabur, a 121-year-old company that has made its fortune (sales of some Rs 1,537 crore in 2004-05) by packaging ayurvedic formulations fast-moving-consumer-goods fashion. There is a unani hakim (doctor, again) at a stall put up by Hamdard, another such company. And some very impressive young men and women sporting white doctors' jackets are bustling around a stall put up by Chandola Homeopathic Medical College and Hospital (based in Rudrapur, a town in Uttaranchal some 255 km to the north-east of Delhi, if you must know), their very western costumes clashing with the medicine system they are selling. The stall of the National Institute of Siddha (founded: September 3, 2005) has neither doctor nor students; instead, it proudly displays a large photograph of ministers from Tamil Nadu who are part of the UPA government (the visage of Anbumani Ramadoss, the Union Minister for Health, smiles down on me) and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

India, it emerges, isn't just a great melting pot of cultures; it is also one of medicine systems. Most stalls display the same herbs, and even as I am digesting the fact that ayurveda's central principle of well-being, revolving around a balance of vak, pith and kaph is the same as siddha's core premise of everything having to do with vatham, pittham and kappam (the reaction of the central and autonomic nervous systems, digestive system, and skeletal and muscular system respectively), I feel something running over my back and neck. It turns out to be an acupressure product, a "vibrator comb" as it is intriguingly named. "Yours for Rs 125," says the unctuous salesman, as he tries to demonstrate the product with me as the subject, the target this time being my arm. I dodge him and come face to face with another of the breed (salesman, that is, not vibrator-combs). "Omega 3 is the only truth you see here," this one intones, singing the benefits of Omega 3 oil extracted from flaxseed. It later dawns on me that the Omega 3 oil (with its proven capability of reducing the chances of cancer and cardiac ailments) is probably the only thing on display at the fair whose claims have the support of modern science.

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Most of the principles behind India's systems of traditional medicine are still beyond the comprehension of Western and Indian scientists. India, a country that produces a fifth of the world's generics (read: drugs that go off patent) but is yet to produce even a single original one, can only establish ayurveda as a credible system of medicine when its scientists prove the efficacy of its medicines (a time- and data-intensive process that even makers of allopathic drugs struggle with). That's easier said and done in the case of ayurveda, siddha and the like. "Lead in any concentration is toxic," says R.A. Mashelkar, Director General, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. "Yet, it is considered a fast healing agent and is used quite freely by siddha practitioners, and there is no reporting of toxic effects." "Is it that the herbs in the medicines get pyrolised and a complex between the pyrolised herb and the element is formed, which then becomes the active compound?" he asks. CSIR has some 500 scientists working to answer that question, and several others related to ayurvedic cures. "We have to push for ayurveda to be recognised as a system of medicine," says Gopal K. Pillai, an additional secretary in India's Ministry of Commerce and Industry that has identified it as an export opportunity going waste.

Then, the 3,000-year-old medicine system is in the news for all the wrong reasons, like a recent article in December 2004 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association that alleges that some ayurvedic medicines are toxic (and the consequent ban of the medicines in Canada). Uma Pillai, Secretary, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, may bravely maintain that such articles are the result of ignorance and business rivalry, but fact is, the Indian approach to selling ayurveda is based more on belief and less on science. And the presence of around 750,000 practitioners of alternative medicine systems, and of around 9,000 pharmacies of the same in the country helps (as compared to some 650,000 allopaths).

Free and for sale: Another free check-up at another stall (L) while some visitors snap up rare herbs

"Earlier we used to receive only chronic cases where patients had run out of allopathic options," says Dr T. Bikshapathi, Director, Central Research Institute, the Central Council for Research in Ayurveda and Siddha (CCRAS). "Now we get them early." Much of that has to do with word-of-mouth publicity. Over the past seven years, for instance, Ranjit Puranik has seen his ayurvedic medicines firm Shree Dhootapapeshwar Ltd (it is 125 years old) grow seven times.

The real crowd-magnet at Arogya, however, are the unani stalls that are attracting attention of precisely the kind they do not want. "Street-hakims have given our industry a bad name," says Mohsin Dehlvi, whose Dehlvi Remedies, the man claims, is doing its bit to change popular perception that unani medicines are "sex medicines". In the same breath he tells me that his company's best-selling product is libido-enhancer Wajid Shah, which contains the excreta of sperm whales "collected from coastal Andamans for upward of Rs 6,50,000 a kg". "Eighty per cent success rate," he whispers to my back as I leave his stall.