Evidence-based morally guided medicine is needed in India
- Conventional and Alternative Medical and Healing Systems: Ayurveda, Yoga, Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha, Sowa-Rigpa, and Homoeopathy
Characteristics of Indian medical systems:
- Their adaptability, diversity, affordability, and widespread acceptance by a significant portion of the general population
- comparatively lower expense and increasing economic worth
- They have a great potential to become the healthcare providers that a huge portion of our population needs.
Motives for Doubt Regarding AYUSH:
- Public scepticism over the validity of Ayurvedic theories and the efficacy of its treatments.
- The Ayurvedic establishment has been unable to keep up with modern scientific and intellectual developments.
- Cleverly disguised as sophisticated dogmas, antiquated notions that are likely to raise doubts in the minds of informed patients are promoted.
- Treatments are designed to evade simple experimental examination due to their purported foundation in these beliefs.
- reduced quality of evidence-based policy.
- Another prevalent belief that typifies the public’s perception of Ayurveda is that its therapies take a while to manifest results.
Homoeopathic medicine:
- 1839 saw the introduction of homoeopathy to India by Austrian physician M. Honigberger
- When a healthy individual mimics a natural sickness and displays symptoms that are comparable, it is a technique for treating patients with medication.
- The theory of “symmetry” serves as the foundation for the complementary medicine practice of homoeopathy.
- This approach treats patients holistically, but it also treats each patient uniquely, taking into account their unique needs.
Safety and effectiveness of homoeopathy:
- There is little proof of homeopathy’s effectiveness.
- The Nuremberg Salt Test (1835), a double-blind randomised controlled trial (RCT), found that the symptoms or alterations that homoeopaths claimed to see as a result of their medications were the
- result of one’s imagination
- deceit of oneself
- preconceived notion
- Across diseases, demographic groupings (adults versus children), study types (placebo-controlled against other trial types), and treatment regimens (individualised versus non-individualizedized), according to numerous systematic reviews and meta-analyses,
- Clinically substantial effects are absent from homoeopathic therapy.
- The effectiveness of homoeopathy also raises questions regarding its therapeutic use and the poor quality of the available data.
- It was shown by researchers that over half of the 193 homoeopathic experiments conducted during the previous 20 years were not recorded.
- While registered trials did not demonstrate efficacy, unregistered trials did.
- The validity and reliability of the findings resulting from these methods were called into question due to reporting bias and other questionable behaviours.
- The World Health Organisation (WHO) has issued a warning against homoeopathic remedies for HIV, TB, malaria, the flu, and diarrhoea in young children.
- It is “no place” in the way they handle it.
- There is growing evidence that homoeopathy is ineffective in treating cancer.
- Contrary to popular opinion, it might not be helpful in reducing the side effects of cancer treatments.
- Adverse events, both fatal and non-fatal, as well as the exacerbation of these events, have been related to treatments.
- Applying evidence-based clinical care is often delayed when someone seeks homoeopathic treatment.
- It has resulted in harm and occasionally fatalities in a number of occasions.
Problems with homoeopathic standards and claims:
- Allopathic physicians do not conveniently select the norms for themselves.
- RCTs and other evidence collection and evaluation techniques are established and maintained cooperatively by a global community.
- promoting evidence-based medicine, which consists of
- epidemiologists
- biostatisticians
- enhancement of quality
- investigators
- managers of implementation
- a number of individuals outside physicians.
- Allopathic medical procedures that did not satisfy the evidentiary criterion have been eliminated thanks to these techniques.
- Evidence synthesis approaches have been successfully applied by a number of fields outside of medicine, including psychology, economics, community health, implementation science, and public policy, to support their assertions.
- Advocates of homoeopathy have not been able to develop credible substitute frameworks for synthesising evidence that are appropriate for evaluating its safety and effectiveness and that the detractors would also accept.
- Homeopathy’s holistic claims are usually combined with evidence-based medicine’s “reductionist” claims.
- The majority of proponents of evidence-based medicine are aware of and receptive to the WHO-endorsed biopsychosocial approaches to health.
- made comprised of proponents and practitioners of evidence-based medicine.
- Establishing empirical evidence is not, and should not be, the end goal of evidence-based medicine.
- Finding and elucidating the mechanisms behind the evidence is the goal.
- There isn’t any hard data to support the hypothesised mechanisms of action for homoeopathy.
- There is no mechanistic (biochemical, physiological, molecular, or otherwise) explanation for the improved health that comes from ideas like “dematerialized spiritual force,” “like cures like,” and “extreme dilution.”
- A number of allopathic and modern medical practices have changed in response to mounting scientific data.
- which homoeopathy does not possess.
The National Ayush Mission
- Started during the 12th Plan for implementation through States/UTs in September 2014 by the Department of AYUSH under the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.
- The Ministry of Ayush is currently in charge of carrying it out.
- The programme calls for growing the AYUSH industry in order to support Indians’ overall health.
- The Mission fills in the gaps in health care by aiding State and UT governments in their efforts to offer AYUSH health services and education across the nation, especially in remote and vulnerable areas.
The Way Ahead:
- In medicine, a pluralistic approach can help decolonize the field.
- Homoeopathy disagrees with this in India.
- In India’s recent past, homoeopathy was introduced for colonial purposes during the colonial era.
- Its customary tag is therefore unjustified.
- Certain colonial-era customs, such as those that promote development and health, may not have to be abandoned.
- improvements to gender roles and caste systems, as well as the evidence-based components of allopathic medicine, ought to be kept.
- The critique of homoeopathy is not predicated on its colonial origins.
- Regarding the absence of proof of efficacy
- a few instances of unsafe behaviour
- no significant advancements in action mechanisms over the previous century
- The escapism arguments of homoeopathic practitioners.
- Evidence-based and morally guided medicine must be the cornerstone of India’s journey towards universal health care.
