Guest post by Alain Braillon
I am not sure to understand the aim of the publication in the BMJ about traditional medicine entitled “India’s struggle to integrate traditional medicine into modern healthcare”.(1)
Indeed, not only it uncritically reported the establishment of the WHO Global Traditional Medicine Centre in Gujarat (1) but it also by-passed that diarrhea is a leading cause of child mortality in India, as in many poor countries. Oral rehydration salts are an inexpensive and lifesaving treatment for child diarrhea but they are widely underused.(2) This hardly acceptable and understandable state of affairs is driven by perceptions that patients do not want oral rehydration salts.(2) Obviously, the perceptions that healthcare professionals must provide culturally appropriate care can have devastating consequences.
Furthemore the case is also a political one with corruption. How could Krishna and the BMJ’s reviewers ignore a decision of the Supreme Court of India?(3) The Court has temporarily banned Patanjali Ayurved – named after a Hindu mystic best known for his writings on yoga – from advertising some of its traditional ayurvedic products.
India’s ruling party is the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi glorifies Hindu traditions. Modi inaugurated Patanjali’s ayurvedic research facility in 2017. Baba Ramdev, a guru and the “marketing ambassador” of Patanjali’s business had received an estimated $46 million in discounts for land acquisitions in states controlled by the BJP.(4)
In 1861, Cheever warned in the journal that is now the New England Journal of Medicine that although “savages” could have great powers of observation, they had no understanding of disease or therapeutic mechanisms that require rigorous analysis of facts with the avoidance of biases.(5) Obviously, modern medicine that required strong evidence, not the subjective experience of emotions, is not a recent concept. Accordingly, I wonder if Krishna could have confused “modern” with “contemporary”. Indeed, presently healthcare is less and less about evidence for a positive benefit/harm ratio on relevant clinical outcomes, as illustrated by the growing flow of marketing approvals based on unvalidated surrogates(6,7) an, and more and more about fraudulent marketing.( 8,9)
Happily, medical devices of our traditional medicine, lancets for bloodletting and clysters for enema, are relegated to museums.
References
- Krishna G. India’s struggle to integrate traditional medicine into modern healthcare. BMJ. 2024;384:q268.5. doi:10.1136/bmj.q268
- Wagner Z, Mohanan M, Zutshi R, Mukherji A, Sood N. What drives poor quality of care for child diarrhea? Experimental evidence from India. Science. 2024;383(6683):eadj9986. doi:10.1126/science.adj9986
- https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2024/03/14/1236533011/ayurvedic-india-banned-advertising-some-products
- https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/india-modi-ramdev/
- Cheever DW. The value and the fallacy of statistics in the observation of disease. Boston Med Surg J 1861;63:476-483 doi:10.1056/NEJM186101100632402
- Brinkhuis F, Goettsch WG, Mantel-Teeuwisse AK, Bloem LT. Added benefit and revenues of oncology drugs approved by the European Medicines Agency between 1995 and 2020: retrospective cohort study. BMJ. 2024;384:e077391. doi:10.1136/bmj-2023-077391
9 Responses to Integrating traditional medicine into modern healthcare?
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That is a big topic with several active posts.
One is stupidity.
One is greed and high criminal energy.
One is corruption.
One is religious insanity.
Actually, the whole thing is a war with language. Just take the word “integration”. Would you call a worm in the guts an integration?
No! It is a parasite, and it is parasitism. Non-working and even deadly “medicines” and “treatments” are no medicine, they are a dangerous parasitism.
One must call it what it is: parasitism.
And it must be killed.
The huge trend to CAM as forecast from 2020 to 2033 by Pharmiweb is driven by social media not by CAM research. CAM Research is a problem for you lot not for CAM users. If you say CAM research sucks then that is ok. Don’t use it and by all means keep trying to spread the word and stop the tide.
We pay for CAM and most of us don’t want it incorporated it into modern healthcare right now.
CAM is not our parasite. I cant see how it is your parasite if you don’t use it.
I, for example, do not do/use many things that are nevertheless a problem – heroin, gambling, violence…
@JK
The main problem is that SCAM’s popularity is based on false pretences, i.e. that it helps people to become or stay healthy. It doesn’t, which means that people are paying for something they are not getting. The latter is also known as ‘deception’ and ‘fraud’.
This problem is exacerbated by the fact that seriously ill and quite often desperate patients are lured by the false notion that SCAM may help them when regular medicine can’t really do anything for them any more – even when they know that it almost certainly doesn’t do anything for them.
Yet another problem is that (mostly uneducated) SCAM artists often advise people to reject proven effective healthcare such as vaccination.
I find it rather strange that we have all sorts of laws prohibiting and punishing fraud in almost every thinkable area – except when it comes to health. It is still perfectly legal for SCAM artists to offer ‘treatments’ that do not do anything except maybe engender a placebo effect (e.g. homeopathy), or offer ‘diagnostics’ that are proven useless (e.g. bioresonance, live blood analysis).
JK on Friday 29 March 2024 at 10:59:
“The huge trend to CAM as forecast from 2020 to 2033 by Pharmiweb is driven by social media not by CAM research.”
Social media is an other word for hordes of paid shills and idiots. Especially the homeopathy mafia uses a number of known advertising mills. It all is a big fraud.
“CAM Research is a problem for you lot not for CAM users.”
Wrong! The “research” is nothing but fakes, which then are used as advertising material by the advertising mills. Like HRI, by the liar and forger Alexander Tournier, or the Carstens-Stiftung:
“Alexander Tournier, ein notorischer Lügner und Fälscher”
https://www.allaxys.com/~kanzlerzwo/index.php?topic=9954
HRI and Carsens-Stiftung are used to make press releases, which then are used by newspapers and other media, which otherwise would charge the cost for advertising. But such press releases they publish for free. This way the media are cheated, and the public is cheated.
“If you say CAM research sucks then that is ok. Don’t use it and by all means keep trying to spread the word and stop the tide.”
So it is okay if OTHER PEOPLE are defrauded? That is a very asocial point of “view”, and it is typical for muggers, thugs, thieves, nazis, and other criminal folk.
“We pay for CAM and most of us don’t want it incorporated it into modern healthcare right now.”
This is a typical pattern: “Do like us, follow us, be like we are” – the social media ARE just that.
“CAM is not our parasite. I cant see how it is your parasite if you don’t use it.”
The same as above. Besides: stupidity is not a means to measure things.
“Integration” generally means incorporating it into healthcare so that everyone pays for it whether they use it or not.
I thought that one of the main reasons that India was integrating “traditional medicine” into medicine was a shortage of medical doctors..
Actually, there are several parties involved:
1. the criminals, who make money by selling fraud under whatever disguise
2. the patients, who are in need of medical treatment – and many of them can not afford it
3. the government, which is a) insane and b) corrupt, and wants to stay at the rudder under all circumstances, so it uses its power to support the frauds and to cheat the patients.
Each of these 3 parties is huge, is an important player, and is driven by need or greed.
Below is a link to some more research by criminals, liars and loons.
Fortunately it is still just before noon April 1st so dont worry too much about it ama.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167732224005932